


Doubt Is A Pain Too Lonely

by Miko



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Mind Games, Mutual Masturbation, Oral Sex, Restraints, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Frustration, Slow Burn, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-07 08:26:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 43,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4256385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miko/pseuds/Miko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pietro was more than just Wanda's twin; he was the rock she leaned on to save her sanity. When an accident on a mission leaves Steve linked to Wanda, he willingly accepts the responsibility of being her foundation instead.</p><p>He <i>thought</i> he knew what he was getting into when he made the decision.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many, many thanks to my beta NocturnalRites, without whom this would have been a very different and not nearly as good story.

_Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that Faith is his twin - Khalil Gibran_

 

There were moments in battle when it seemed to Steve as if time actually slowed down. It had always been that way, even when he was a kid. There was a split second that always seemed to last forever when he could see the other guy’s fist heading for his face, knew he was about to get his nose broken again, but couldn’t make his body move fast enough to do anything about it.

The effect had become far more pronounced after the serum, and sometimes he was even able to react quickly enough to deal with whatever it was he saw coming. But this… there was nothing he could do about this.

The Enhanced killer they’d been tracking was fast; not too fast to see as Pietro had been, but fast enough to be a blur. Steve was dismayed but not really surprised when Wanda grew overwrought, distressed by the salt rubbed into the still raw wound in her heart. She started blasting indiscriminately, trying to anticipate and stop the enemy, while Steve did his best to protect her back and stop the Enhanced from reaching her.

The moment when time seemed to slow came when she smashed through one too many of the old, rusted support beams holding up the roof of the derelict factory. Steve heard the noise first, the sickening groan and shriek of metal giving way, the warning rumble as the collapse began.

Like an avalanche it started gradually, seemingly harmless, but it gained momentum quickly. Wanda heard the sound and screamed, pushing outwards with her powers in all directions as if she was trying to force the building to explode instead of collapse, but she’d already wearied herself too much attempting to pin down the Enhanced.

If there was nothing Steve could do to stop it, there was at least something he could do to try to mitigate the damage. With a shout of warning he tackled Wanda to the ground, aiming for a solid-looking corner and making certain she ended up tucked beneath him. He got his shield up barely in time to block the first falling chunk of concrete, and then it became a struggle to keep from being crushed.

It was even worse than when the bomb had hit the old SHIELD bunker he was in with Natasha, because then at least they’d been in a narrow space and he’d only needed to shield upwards. Now it was coming from all sides as well.

The shield absorbed momentum, but it couldn’t stop things on top of it from being just plain _heavy_. Steve crouched in a way that let him brace one elbow on his knee, his right hand gripping the wrist of his left and adding extra support to his shield arm.

Even so, it almost wasn’t enough. Concrete and metal pounded against the shield until he was sure his arm would snap under the pressure. A piece of something that made it past the edge of the shield smashed into his left leg, and if the stab of gut-wrenching agony was anything to go by, the limb was badly broken.

There was too much noise for him to be able to tell if Wanda was still screaming. He’d expected to see the flare of her power helping him to create a safe bubble for them, but there was nothing. Steve risked a quick glance over his shoulder, and found her lying beneath him, unmoving and limp. There was blood on her temple where debris had hit her, and her eyes were closed. No help from that quarter, then.

Gritting his teeth, Steve dug in harder and hung on.

The torrent of rock and steel seemed to go on forever, until he started to wonder if it was ever going to stop. He didn’t know if that was the time dilation or if it really did take that long for the whole thing to settle. Dust rose in choking clouds and he hid his face against his arm, trying to breathe through the fabric of his sleeve.

Finally it was over. Coughing hard, Steve tentatively lowered his shield a bare inch, waiting to see if the debris above them was going to shift without his support. When nothing happened, he withdrew further and looked up. The dust swirled around him, and he could taste the grit between his teeth like he’d been eating sand.

There was a tiny bit of light coming in through cracks here and there, which was doubly reassuring because it meant they also had air. That was good, because judging by the size of the chunks of wall and metal support beams that had created the pocket around them, they might not be going anywhere any time soon.

Steve reached for the smallest piece he could see near an air hole, but when he tried to brace himself to push his injured leg screamed a protest that even he couldn’t ignore. Gasping and dizzy with pain, he collapsed back down. No, they definitely weren’t getting out of here unless Wanda could do it.

When he turned to her he found that she had indeed been knocked unconscious. Gently Steve patted her down, checking for further injuries and broken bones. She had plenty of cuts and scrapes and the start of what would become some striking bruises, but nothing broken he could find. He was very careful not to move her or jostle her spine, just in case.

By the time he got to the end of his inspection she was starting to stir. “Hey,” he said, keeping his voice low and soothing, reaching out to touch her arm. “Don’t move, you might have…”

Her eyes opened; she took one look at the rubble and the tiny space around them, and started to scream hysterically. Red flared all around her, reaching for him greedily, too fast to avoid. Before he even knew what was happening Steve found himself sucked down into an emotional vortex, lost to reality.

_She was so hungry her stomach seemed wrapped around her spine and so thirsty she thought she would die. Behind her, pressed tight against her, she could feel her brother. Everywhere on her body was battered and bruised, and she’d never felt so much pain in all her short life._

_Two days since the bomb had hit, their parents had died, and they had been trapped here under the rubble that had been their home. Two nights, and two days, and it was almost sunset on the third night._

_They were lying in their own reeking filth, unable to move enough to keep from soiling themselves. The thirst was so bad she’d even thought about trying to drink his piss, but hadn’t been able to scrunch down enough in the tiny space. Neither of them had gone in a while anyway, too dried out to need to._

_Above she could hear the rescue workers chipping away, struggling to find a way to reach them through the debris. Every so often the workers would call out to them, making certain they were still alive to be rescued. She was terrified that soon she and her brother wouldn’t be able to make enough noise through parched throats to reassure them, and they would stop trying._

_Through it all, staring her in the face, was the bomb. The bomb that would surely go off at any second, at the next creak in the building or shift in the debris. The bomb she knew had their death written all over it._

_And their death was spelled ‘STARK’._

_Now, on top of everything else, the temperature was dropping rapidly and ice was appearing all over the room, great chunks of it forming on every surface - including his body. He was too injured from the crash to move and barely conscious; aware enough to feel it as he froze to death, but not aware enough to do anything about it. His heartbeat was slowing, slowing, slowing…_

The agonizing familiarity of the last part allowed Steve to find his sense of self, enough to move as far from Wanda as he could and break the contact between them. His injured leg shot another flare of pain through him as he leaned on it deliberately, using the sensation to stay anchored in the here and now. He was panting, shaking with fear, barely able to keep the vision from yanking him back in.

Wanda had stopped screaming, but it wasn’t an improvement. Instead she was making the most heart-wrenching, childish whimpers, curled into an even tighter ball with her eyes screwed shut as if to block out the vision she was forcing on herself. God, no wonder she was lost to her own worst fear, if that had been a real memory for her.

The question was, how the hell was he supposed to break her out of it? Steve doubted shouting was going to work, and touching her to shake her would draw him right back into it.

Well, when all else failed, he could always fall back on his greatest strength. Sheer, stubborn determination.

Closing his eyes, Steve focused as hard as he could on the best moment of his life, dragging the sights and sounds and even smells of it to the surface of his mind. His serum enhanced memory served him well for this, having captured the tiniest details. Taking a deep breath, he reached out and made contact with her again, holding as tightly to the image as he could.

_More exhausted than he’d ever been in his life, he came to a halt in front of Colonel Phillips. Behind him was a long train of men and equipment he’d liberated from HYDRA, and before him the population of the army camp were spilling out of their tents, forming a curious and eager crowd. Everything smelled of rotten food, gunpowder, and unwashed bodies, but stench or not he felt more gratitude to be back in the camp than he’d ever felt for anything before._

_Being back meant he’d succeeded. He’d rescued the men, and led them safely through enemy territory. He’d lost some along the way, of course, but the vast majority of those who’d started out from the HYDRA base were still with him now._

_He knew he was going to be in deep shit for going AWOL behind enemy lines. He’d known that from the first moment he’d chosen to do it, but it hadn’t mattered. Nothing, absolutely nothing had mattered except finding Bucky and rescuing those men. He’d done that, so now it was time to face the music and be a man about it, take responsibility for his actions._

_Except Colonel Phillips was shaking his head and saying, “That won’t be necessary.” He stared at the officer, certain he’d heard wrong, or that the colonel was going to follow it up with a declaration of something far worse than mere disciplinary action._

_Why did the gleam in the colonel’s eyes look more like respect than his usual disdain?_

_“Let’s hear it for Captain America!” Bucky’s familiar voice proclaimed, and it was strange hearing the name from his friend. Strange, but good, causing a feeling of warmth and happiness and pride to well up in his chest._

_Everyone was cheering – the men in the camp, the same guys who’d heckled him off the stage a few days before. And the men that he’d rescued, hundreds of people who were alive because of what he’d done._

_And Peggy was smiling at him, relieved and joyful to see him alive, even more relieved and joyful to see all the men she’d helped him to save. The pride and admiration in her eyes made him feel even better than the respect in Colonel Phillips’._

_He wasn’t just a lab rat or a dancing monkey, and now nobody would doubt it. He’d done the right thing, he’d lived up to the promise he’d made Dr. Erskine, and he’d made a difference._

_Nothing was ever going to convince him to let them sideline him again._

_Among the crowd of men there was a young girl staring at him, battered and filthy and caked in dried dust. She was out of place, impossible. Frowning, he headed towards her, concerned. Was she a local refugee? The crowd was paying no attention to her._

_When he touched her shoulder, suddenly she was an adult, a young woman looking back at him through the same haunted, bruised eyes. “Steve?”_

_“Wanda,” he replied, and the name was enough…_

…to shove him back to reality. Panting, Steve reeled back once more, but this time Wanda was sitting up and looking at him. She was still shivering, red lights flaring in her eyes and around her hands.

“You with me?” Steve asked, wanting to be sure, and she nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, ragged and hoarse. It was clear she was barely keeping it together even now, hanging on to reality by the skin of her teeth. Her eyes were fixed on him as if the sight was the only thing keeping her sane.

“It’s all right,” he assured her, his voice nearly as rough even if his control over his emotions was stronger than hers right now. “Everyone has a worst fear and a breaking point, Wanda. You know that better than anyone ever has.” When she appeared unconvinced, ashamed of her own weakness, he added gruffly, “Where do you think the ice was coming from? Can’t say I’m all that fond of tight spaces myself.”

“Ice?” she repeated, confused. She blinked, and he saw comprehension flood her eyes as she remembered the unfamiliar twist her vision had taken. Sighing, she lowered her gaze, and a tiny fraction of the tension drained out of her. “Yes, of course.”

“You’re not a helpless ten year old anymore,” he reminded her, reaching for her hand but letting her make the decision of whether to close the last inch of distance. She hesitated, but finally wrapped her fingers around his, hanging on so tightly it would have hurt anyone else. “There is no bomb, and we’ll be out of here in no time. A little building collapse isn’t going to keep you pinned long, these days.”

“Yes,” she said again, full of gratitude and embarrassment. “Let me just…”

Red light flared around them, shining in her eyes and making her look demonic as she pushed her power outwards to force a hole to the surface. But the glow didn’t make it more than a foot before she cried out and clutched at her head, collapsing back into the rubble.

Her power, however, did not collapse with her. Instead it spiked outwards uncontrollably, slamming into the debris around them and shaking it loose once more. Steve dove forward to cover her, tucking his head as far towards his chest as he could, taking the brunt of the impacts on his back and shoulders.

When it subsided again they were pressed together along the length of their bodies and there was no room to go anywhere. Somehow they hadn’t been crushed completely, but Steve could feel the weight against his back and it wasn’t budging no matter how much he heaved at it. He had no leverage from this position, and he was afraid to try too hard lest he shift the whole thing. They might not be so lucky a third time.

Beneath him Wanda was whimpering again, rapidly scaling up towards another scream. “I’ve got you,” he said, and worked his arms around her to pull her into an awkward embrace. “Wanda, I’ve got you, you’re safe. You’re safe, I promise, I swear to God, we’re okay. Everything is okay.” In his mind he held desperately to that good memory, refusing to allow her to suck him into the abyss of her fear.

“Pietro,” she sobbed, and clung to him like a lifeline. Not surprising she’d think he was her brother, given the circumstances. Steve felt bad, but he ran with it, hoping it would reassure her enough to get her to calm again.

“I’m here,” he promised. “I’m right here, you’re okay. I’ve got you.”

Finally the darkness of her memories stopped trying to haul him into them, and she relaxed marginally against him. “Wanda?” he asked cautiously, not sure if she had maybe passed out from the strain.

“Yes, I’m here,” she whispered, shuddering. “I’m…”

“If you say ‘sorry’ I’ll pinch you,” Steve interrupted her, worried she was going to end up sliding into a downward spiral of fear and regret. “I told you, it’s all right. You’re only human, I’m not going to think less of you for that.”

“Well. The ‘only human’ part is debatable,” she said. It was a pathetically weak attempt at humour, but it was a good sign that she was trying. “My powers aren’t responding properly. I feel as bad as when Barton hit me with that shock arrow.”

“Concussion,” he guessed. “And unlike the shock arrow that’s not going to wear off in a hurry.”

“Then we _are_ trapped,” she exclaimed, fear creeping from her mind into his again.

“ _No_ , we’re not,” he corrected her firmly. “In less than half an hour we’re going to miss checking in with HQ, and Natasha and the others will come looking for us. Rhodey and Vision will pull us out of here without even blinking twice. We’re stuck, not trapped. There’s a difference.”

There was the possibility that the Enhanced man they’d been fighting had escaped the collapse, though he’d been far from an exit at the time. Even if he had, though, Steve doubted he would stick around to dig through tonnes of rubble in an attempt to finish the two of them off. More likely he’d count his lucky stars and get while the getting was good.

“Talk to me,” he ordered when she remained silent. “Wanda, you have to stay focused and awake.” And not lost in horrific memories that could draw him in all too easily.

Steve could still feel what she was feeling, a wash of emotions spilling through him and trying to drag him along with them, convince him they were his own. It was difficult to sort out where he stopped and she began. 

This was nothing like the other time she’d been in his head, when she’d planted something in his mind and withdrawn again to let the nightmare run its course. Instead it was an active, fluid connection that seemed to go both ways.

“Tell me about Pietro,” he tried, knowing it would hurt her but desperate for something that would keep her engaged. Unfortunately he’d underestimated _how_ badly it would hurt her; the spike of agonizing grief and crushing loneliness that poured into his soul was sharper than any weapon had ever been.

Worse, her emotions touched on the grief and loneliness and survivor’s guilt that lived in him already, connecting with them and expanding them. Thoughts of Bucky and Peggy flashed through his mind, a whirlwind of images of the people he’d loved and lost.

Steve felt her startle away from the pain inside him that echoed her own. Part of him wanted to growl, to snap ‘You thought you were the only one who ever lost somebody important?’, but he swallowed the impulse with an effort. Truly, he _couldn’t_ imagine the emotional Hell she lived in, having lost a twin. The thought that it would hurt even more than losing Bucky and Peggy was awful.

Except now he didn’t have to imagine it, because he could feel it. And it _was_ worse than his pain, as if half of her soul had been torn away and the injury remained fresh, raw, bleeding out into the void. Instinctively Steve reached out to try to staunch the wound, to give comfort, offering not only sympathy but _empathy_.

Wanda latched on to that and hung on tight, and beneath him he felt her physical shudders lessen. The emotional agony eased slowly as well, and Steve was able to breathe again as the devastating grief retreated.

“I’m sorry,” it was his turn to apologize, his voice hoarse. “I didn’t mean... I was trying to get you focused. That was thoughtless.”

“You understand,” she breathed out, reaching up to trace his face with the fingers of one hand. It was a strange touch, unexpectedly intimate, like she was memorizing his features by feel to convince herself that he was really there.

“Not very well, apparently, or I wouldn’t have poked the wound,” Steve said, closing his eyes and submitting to the touch. “I think a lot of people understand more than you believe they will. Just about everyone has lost somebody at some point.”

“But they have never had their entire world ripped away from them and turned to ashes,” she replied, full of bitterness and resentment. “They have never known what it is to lose not only something that matters, but _everything_ that matters.”

That was true. It was one of the things that always seemed to keep Steve separate from everyone else, no matter how hard he tried to make connections. They sympathized with his plight, even pitied him for it, but nobody could ever understand how _much_ he’d lost. Not really.

It wasn’t only the friends who’d grown old and died while he slept in the ice. It wasn’t only the places he’d loved that now felt unfamiliar and unwelcoming. It was the culture, the shared life experiences, the basic ingrained responses of an entire generation that he no longer belonged to. 

The world and technology were baffling, but the _people_ seemed as alien to Steve as the Chitauri, sometimes.

“I knew it haunted you, but not how badly.” Wanda sighed, and her hand fell away from his face. Steve opened his eyes, and saw her looking up at him with mingled shame and sympathy. “That was private, I shouldn’t have pried.”

“I started it,” Steve pointed out, shrugging as best he could when he was pinned against her. “And if it helped you to not feel alone, I don’t mind sharing.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, and turned her head so her face was tucked into his shoulder. Her arms came around him in return, as much as she could before hitting the debris. “You are too good to be real, sometimes. No one can be so selfless.”

“I hear that a lot,” Steve admitted with a small smile. “But you of all people should know better. I’ve got flaws and a dark side, just like everyone else.”

“Even so. Who else would let me cause them that much pain, and then say it’s all right as long as it helped me?” Wanda shook her head. “Pietro... he was my only constant. No matter how bad things got, and they got very bad, I always had him.”

The echo of his own words to Sam and Natasha didn’t escape Steve. ‘Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky’. At least Wanda hadn’t left Pietro to be tortured by their enemies for seventy years. That was something. He didn’t think it would really be much consolation to her if he said it, though.

“Tell me about _him_ , though,” Steve insisted, wanting to keep her talking now that she’d started. “All I really saw of him was on the flight from Seoul, and we were all too exhausted and worried to say much.”

Biting her lip, Wanda thought about that. “He had the wickedest sense of humour,” she said finally, her voice soft. “He loved pranks far too much. Once, before the bombs, he...”

As Steve had hoped, she quickly warmed to the topic. And the more she talked about her good memories of Pietro, the more the darkness hanging between them faded. The memories remained painful but she wasn’t focused on her grief and trauma anymore, and that was what mattered.

He wasn’t certain how long they stayed there together, wrapped around each other not just because there was nowhere else to go, but for the comfort of the contact. Eventually she prodded him into trading stories about Bucky for ones about Pietro, and Steve certainly didn’t mind thinking about the good days with his best friend instead of the horrible current situation with the Winter Soldier.

He even managed to make her laugh when he confessed to throwing up on the rollercoaster. When Wanda said she’d never been to any kind of amusement park, he agreed to let her peek into his mind and see what it was like.

Reliving the memory with Wanda along for the ride - no pun intended - was a very different experience from simply remembering it, as he’d already discovered. His recollections from before the serum weren’t as sharp as the ones from after, but it felt as though he was walking down the midway at Coney Island again. Exactly as it had been back then - the sights, the sounds, the smells, all of it familiar and welcoming in a way that made him homesick.

She was so fascinated by everything about the memory that he went back to the start and took her through the whole day, as much of it as he could recall. The rides, the food, the games; all of it was far outside the realm of her experience. Steve had plenty of memories that involved warzones, but she’d effectively lived in one all her life.

About the time he was remembering helping to haul the giant stuffed dog Bucky had won on the midway home for his friend’s sister, a sudden flash of bright light and loud noise jolted them both out of the vision. Blinking and shaking his head to try to clear it of the echoes of midway music, Steve looked up to find the War Machine suit peering in at them through a hole created by lifting one of the bigger pieces of former wall away.

“Rogers,” Rhodey exclaimed, his voice tinny over the speakers. “Thank God. When you didn’t answer we were afraid you guys were unconscious or dead down there.”

“Rhodes,” Steve replied, squinting up at him. The sun was shining directly in through the east-facing hole, which seemed impossible. Had they been down here all night? Well, it had seemed as though time was passing almost normally in his memory, so maybe they had been.

“Why didn’t Maximoff blast you guys out of there?” Rhodey asked, grabbing another chunk of the concrete and hauling it aside. Steve felt Wanda shudder when the action made the rest of the debris groan and settle.

“She’s got a concussion,” Steve told Rhodey. “We’re gonna have to lift her out carefully, there might be other injuries I didn’t see.”

“I’m all right,” Wanda insisted, but she winced when Steve shifted his weight and the light hit her eyes. Even so, she looked worlds better already, just from the knowledge that freedom was mere moments away.

In the end they had to pull Steve out first, because there simply wasn’t any way to get Wanda safely out from under him. The moment he lost contact with her, the pain in his broken leg that he’d thought had settled into a dull ache slammed back into him at full strength. Steve hissed through his teeth as he let the War Machine haul him up out of the hole, and nearly collapsed again when his feet hit the ground. He had to cling to a nearby twisted girder to stay upright, and couldn’t put any weight on the leg at all.

“Let me see,” Natasha demanded, kneeling in front of him and gently taking his leg in her hands, feeling along the edge of the injury. Steve bit his cheek hard enough to taste blood, determined not to be a baby about it. “Damn. It’s a compound break, but your skin has healed around it and it’s already started to set where the bones are in contact. We’ll have to re-break it, but that can wait until we get you back to the base. That has to be agony, even for you.”

“You didn’t tell me you were injured so badly,” Wanda exclaimed as she climbed out of the hole as well, shaky but apparently mostly unharmed. Her face was bloody and filthy, her hair a tangled mess, and Steve was sure he looked equally bad.

“Wasn’t really relevant, there wasn’t anything you could do about it.” Steve shrugged. “Anyway it seems like you were blocking most of the pain somehow, it hurt again as soon as I was away from you.”

That made her frown, confused and thoughtful. Before he could ask what was wrong, Natasha stood and dusted her hands off.

“Vision confirmed that the target was killed in the building collapse,” she announced. “Getting you two out was all that was left. We were calling your names but you didn’t answer, Rhodey had to scan for heat signatures so we could find you. Were you asleep down there?”

“Something like that,” Steve muttered, and fought hard against the heat that wanted to rise to his cheeks. He knew perfectly well what Natasha would assume if she saw him blush, and they _had_ been in a rather compromising position.

Of course she took one look at his expression and smirked at him, blush or no blush. “Don’t start,” he growled, trying not to sound cross. Her obsession with meddling in his love life was harder to take some days than others, and this was one of those days. What he and Wanda had shared down there wasn’t something he wanted to explain, or have Natasha poke fun at. It was personal and private, just between the two of them.

Glancing over at Wanda as Sam slung an arm around her to help her to the Quinjet, Steve watched her go with an odd pang of loneliness. It _had_ helped, to share that pain with her, at least for him. He hoped it had helped her as well, to ease the agony caused by thinking of Pietro.

He had a funny feeling he wasn’t ever going to be able to look at her quite the same way again.


	2. Chapter 2

The moment Steve and Sam walked into the base, returning from yet another futile hunt on a lead about Bucky, Steve knew something was deeply wrong. There weren’t as many people visible in the compound as usual, and the ones he did see were all quiet and subdued. Not quite to the level of being in shock, but it wasn’t far from that.

Natasha was waiting for them inside the doors from the Quinjet hangar. “What happened?” Steve demanded when he spotted her. “Did someone die? Another world-wide terrorist or alien attack?”

“Nothing that dire,” she assured him, but her smile was the slightest bit ragged around the edges. “Sam, you go ahead and get cleaned up and settled in. I need to steal Steve for a minute.”

Narrowing his eyes, Steve studied her. She gave nothing more away with her expression or body language, of course. He’d seen her be convincingly casual during several ‘end of the world’ events now and he knew not much could faze her. She was still using first names, so that was a good sign. She tended to go formal with surnames when things got serious, though not always.

She met his stare with a tiny shake of her head. She wanted to discuss it in private. “Your office?” he suggested, and she turned to lead the way.

The moment the door was closed and locked behind them, Natasha’s casual attitude fell away. Steve was relieved to see that what lay beneath was serious but, as she’d said, not dire. “What happened?” he asked again. “Everyone is walking around looking like…” He couldn’t find a good comparison.

“Like the Avengers did on our field trip to Clint’s farm?” Natasha suggested wryly.

Steve felt his jaw go tight, because she was right. That was exactly what it reminded him of, though thankfully on a lesser scale. “Wanda?”

“You know her control hasn’t been great since the building collapse,” Natasha replied, perching on the edge of her desk rather than taking one of the chairs. Steve kept his feet as well, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms. “It seemed as if she was improving slowly, but shortly after you left she went sharply downhill. Mostly at night, to her credit; she’s been holding it together during the day. But when she sleeps...” Natasha shook her head. “We’re all getting her nightmares, combined with our own worst fears.”

Having experienced the impact of those nightmares himself, Steve could certainly understand why everyone on the base looked shaky. “That’s probably feeding back to her and making the whole thing worse,” he pointed out grimly. God, what would that be like, to have the nightmares of hundreds of people pushing in on you and warping your dreams? How the hell had she ever stayed sane at all, was the real question.

“Maybe what we need to do is get her away from all these people, give her a chance to heal properly and get her bearings again,” he suggested. “What about that cabin, the one SHIELD put me in for a while when I first woke up?” 

“You think sticking her in the middle of nowhere and leaving her alone to brood is a good idea?” Natasha countered, raising an eyebrow at him.

“No, of course not. I’ll go with her. I’ve already gotten the worst of what she has to throw at me, in that building, so I know I’ll get through it okay. And she definitely shouldn’t be alone.” Steve was absolutely certain of that much. Her grief and loneliness was exactly what was eating her alive, and to take away all of what little support she’d managed to find among the Avengers would push her over the edge faster than anything else could.

“Hnh.”

The noise was the one Natasha made sometimes, when something struck her as odd and she got thoughtful. It wasn’t quite a real word, more of a huff that was vocalized. Most of the time when she did it around Steve, it served as a warning to brace himself for either teasing or an in-depth examination of his non-existent love life. Usually both.

“What?” he asked, resigning himself to the inevitable.

“Nothing,” she replied, but now she was sporting the secretive smile that meant she thought she’d figured out something about him.

“ _What_?” he demanded, because it was usually best to head her off at the pass with this sort of thing. “It’s never nothing when you do that. Go ahead and get it out of your system.”

“No, really, it’s nothing,” Natasha insisted, even as her smile widened. “I think it’s cute, that’s all.”

Cute? What the hell about this mess was cute? Steve frowned at her, brow furrowed in confusion. Seeing that, she shrugged and elaborated. “The way you’ve gone all fierce and protective of Wanda. Not in a way that’s hampering the team, just… considerate, I guess. You always seem to be aware of her since we pulled you out of the building. I’d say you’ve got a crush.”

“It’s not like that,” Steve denied, almost reflexively. She rolled her eyes, and his frown turned to a scowl. “It’s not. There was nothing sexual about it, Natasha. I guess I feel there’s more of a connection between us now, yeah, but that’s not infatuation.”

“Oh, I believe you that nothing sexual happened down there,” Natasha assured him. “Doesn’t mean the thought of it wasn’t planted. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t turn that way later, for that matter.”

“Would you please stop with the matchmaking attempts?” he begged, even though he already knew it was futile. There was more than one reason why he refused to follow up on any of her suggestions, but in this case it was hitting too close to home.

Hell, maybe she was right. Why should the teasing about Wanda sting more than any of the rest of Natasha’s attempts to set him up?

“Hey, you’re the one who said you wanted shared life experiences,” she reminded him. “You’re never going to get any closer than Wanda.”

That was true, he had to admit. It wasn’t only that she shared the experience of submitting herself to experimentation for the sake of her country, of being turned into something _not human_ and having no one ever look at you the same way again. 

No, she also shared the experience of trying to sleep on the hard ground while guns fired in the distance, knowing that at any moment a bomb could drop and there would be nothing you could do about it. The experience of living in deprivation, where meat was a rare treat and sugar an indulgence, and sometimes you didn’t know when your next meal might be coming at all. 

Those were things that many Americans of his generation were familiar with, having gone through first the Depression and then the strict rationing imposed during the war. Not to mention while serving in the war itself, when the height of luxury was an extra blanket, food that wasn’t a K-ration, and a place to sleep where the bombs wouldn’t fall. 

So few of the people he’d met from the current generation seemed to appreciate how _much_ they had. They took it all for granted and still expected more. 

Steve remembered watching Wanda, the first time she ate a meal in the base cafeteria. She’d marveled at having multiple types of protein and fresh vegetables to choose from, and had been shocked by everyone's complaints about the bland, boring fare. He'd had the same reaction the first time he’d gone to SHIELD's cafeteria for a meal, not long after he'd awakened from the ice. 

Damn it, now that Natasha had put the idea in his head, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Which was exactly her intention, he knew, but there were far too many potential problems.

“I’m her commanding officer,” Steve pointed out, going with the safest of his objections.

Natasha snorted, actually _snorted_ a laugh, as if she’d tried to swallow it and choked instead. “Okay, first of all, this is not a military organization,” she replied when she had control of herself. “If it was, Rhodes would be in charge, not you. And second of all, she could turn you into a smear on the wall, Steve. She could rewrite your mind and make you forget you’d ever wanted her if you asked her to do something she didn’t like.”

Once again, Natasha had a point.

“I dare you to tell Wanda that you think she would feel too pressured or intimidated to say ‘no’ to you,” she continued. Her eyes sparkled wickedly and her smile was really more of a smirk. “Oh, but make sure I’m there at the time. I want to see the fireworks go off.”

“All right, all right,” he gave in. “So maybe that’s not a consideration. The others could still feel I’m playing favourites, though.”

“Did the Commandos ever resent Barnes?” she countered. “Did you ever favour him?”

“What?” Steve shook his head. “Hell, no. I needed Bucky at my side more than anybody. He went on all the worst missions.”

“There you go.” She shrugged. “The team knows you well enough to know you would never put personal interests ahead of your duty, Steve. You’re closer to me than the rest but you’d send me on a near-certain suicide run without hesitation if that was really the only option. And you’d take it on yourself even faster.”

Yet again, all true, but there were still problems with the idea. Problems Steve didn’t talk about, _especially_ not with Natasha. He needed to end this conversation before she got any further in her attempts to shoot down all his objections. “Much as I know you love sidetracking things by discussing my lack of dates, we really should be focusing on the issues at hand.”

“Oh?” Her smirk widened further. “Here I thought you taking her to an isolated cabin to be alone together was addressing _both_ issues quite neatly.”

Frustrated, Steve ran a hand through his hair and glared at her. “Would you please get your mind outta the damn gutter?”

Natasha faked a wince. “Ooh, I know I’m pushing the line when you say things like ‘guttah’.”

“And now you’re makin’ fun of my accent,” he growled. Steve’s mother had worked so hard to keep him from sounding ‘uneducated’, coaching and correcting him and never letting up for a moment. They’d reinforced that during the USO tour, wanting him to stick tight to that ‘All-American’ sound.

But the Brooklyn did still slip in there sometimes, usually when he was exhausted or angry or upset. He didn’t much appreciate Natasha poking fun at it.

“Well, I have so few opportunities. Usually you only do it when we’re deep in a battle, and it’s not really appropriate to tease you then. I have to take my chances when I get them.”

“Remind me again why you’re one of my closest friends?” he muttered. Sometimes he really did wonder.

“Because I make fun of your accent,” she assured him blithely. He gave her an incredulous look, and her smirk softened into a sympathetic smile. “That’s when I know I’m really talking to Steve Rogers, not Captain America.”

That set him back on his heels. Why was Natasha the only person who seemed to understand that those were actually two separate people to him? Not that he had split personalities or something, but he was always aware of _being_ Captain America, of the image it meant he had to live up to. Dr. Erskine had pinned his hopes on Steve and an entire nation had followed behind. It was a heavy weight to carry, sometimes.

Steve Rogers, though, he was still just a skinny kid from Brooklyn. At least in his own mind.

Now that he thought about it he couldn’t remember Natasha ever referring to him as ‘Cap’ outside of a battle. Nobody ever called her ‘Widow’ or Tony ‘Iron Man’ in casual conversation, but they didn’t seem to think much of using his code name interchangeably with his real one. Hill at least was addressing him by rank, ‘Captain’, and she almost never did it off duty. But from the others it was always ‘Cap’. It irked Steve, but never enough to be worth saying anything about it.

“See?” she prompted him, smug as a cat licking cream from her whiskers. “You love me because I make fun of your accent.”

“Love you like a bratty little sister, maybe,” he retorted, but there was something warm and soft inside his chest as he spoke. “There’re still serious flaws in the logic of that statement.”

“All right, enough stalling, Rogers. We’ve got an actual problem to deal with, so let’s get some work done,” she declared, pushing off the desk and striding towards the door, suddenly all business.

“I’m sorry, _who_ wasn’t letting us get any work done?” Steve asked, but followed her into the hall, shaking his head as he did.

She was impossible to deal with and frequently drove him crazy, but despite what he knew was her personal view on friendship, Steve thought Natasha made a pretty damn good one when she put her mind to it.

* * *

Pausing at the perimeter fence about a quarter mile out from the cabin, Steve activated the electricity. The subtle hum carried clearly through the still air, echoing over the snow that was already thick on the ground this high in the mountains. The sharp scent of pine trees was joined by a faint hint of ozone.

“And you say this isn’t meant to be a prison,” Wanda murmured, her tone deeply bitter as she looked at the barrier.

Steve laughed. “Wanda, that fence couldn’t stop you for three seconds. It’s to make doubly sure the animals don’t get in, that’s all. There’re bears and cougars up here.” He paused, and considered that. “Not that they’d be much of a threat, but even you can be caught by surprise. Trust me, the most annoying thing about that fence was that it meant running twenty miles required doing a _lot_ of circles around the cabin.”

And it would be equally as annoying the second time around, probably. Maybe more so, since he wasn’t distracted this time by trying to catch up on everything he’d missed in the decades he’d been asleep.

The fence could, in fact, serve a double purpose, and there were more stringent methods of keeping people out - or in - that could be activated, but none of those were necessary for what they needed right now.

“Was?” Wanda repeated, surprised. “You’ve been here before?”

“Yeah, SHIELD sent me here right after I first woke up,” Steve said, heading up the path towards the cabin. “Gave me a chance to get oriented without all the distractions. I had a lot to figure out, and in New York there were important people showing up every two minutes wanting to see me. Not to mention the way my own hometown felt like an alien city, even before the actual aliens showed up.”

The information seemed to comfort her. Maybe it was the confirmation that they’d obviously allowed him back _out_ again. At the time, he’d kind of wondered that himself. 

The cabin itself was cozy and well built. Once they were inside with the door shut, the wind cut off and it was immediately warmer. The temperature controls had been activated at the same time he’d turned on the fence, so that helped too. The furniture looked lived in without appearing worn, and there were cheerful pictures on the walls. The scent of dust hung heavy in the air, but that would be gone as soon as the heaters started really moving the air around.

It seemed like a typical family vacation home, in short. Unless you knew about the triple reinforced walls, or the fact that bunker-style shielding could slam down over all the exits, that was.

“If it’s still laid out the way it was before, there’s just the one bedroom,” he said apologetically. “I’ll sleep out on the couch.”

“You’re staying?” she stared at him, surprised again.

“Of course I’m staying,” Steve replied, as surprised by her question as she was by his statement. “I’m not leaving you here alone, Wanda. I told you, this isn’t a punishment or an exile. It’s a chance for you to get your feet back under you without having to deal with all those people pushing in on you.”

“If I did that much damage spread out over the minds of so many people, what do you think will happen the first time I fall asleep with you here?” she asked, growing distressed. “I could destroy your mind entirely or trap you in a nightmare forever.”

“If that was going to happen, it already would have,” Steve said, putting as much conviction in his voice and expression as he could. “You sucked me straight in with you in that collapsed building. I pulled free then and shook you loose, too. I’ll do it again if I have to.”

Biting her lip, she studied him as if she could see into his heart. Which, actually, she _could_ , but she seemed to be weighing his expression as well. Finally she shook her head. “This is a bad idea,” she told him, her voice wavering. “You should be as far away from me as possible. Don’t you see? I lost control while you were away from the base. _Because_ you were away. I connected us, that day, and I don’t know how to undo it. It will only grow stronger if you stay here with me.”

“You linked us?” It was true he’d felt more… _aware_ of her, since then. Natasha had noticed and assumed it was attraction, but that wasn’t quite right.

“From the moment I first got my powers, I lived in Pietro’s head nearly as much as my own,” Wanda explained. “We were already closer than could be explained, as twins sometimes are, but this was so much more than that. He saved my sanity. When it got to be too much, the thoughts and emotions and visions flooding into me, I could retreat to his mind and leave all that behind until I felt strong enough to face it.”

That made a certain amount of sense, Steve supposed. “So he acted as a buffer for you,” he said slowly, feeling his way through it. Steve wasn’t necessarily the best at reading people, that was Natasha’s strength, but it had seemed lately as though he was always able to tell how Wanda felt. Now that he was paying attention he realized it was because he could sense her, sort of a very low-grade version of the way her emotions had flooded through him when they’d been trapped.

“He always seemed closest when we slept,” Wanda said softly, and he could feel her sorrow as much as hear it in her voice. “His mind must have sheltered mine then, too. Without realizing it, I’ve been using you the same way.”

“But you were managing fine before that mission,” Steve protested. “Were you linked to someone else?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Wanda shook her head and spread her hands, a helpless gesture. “I had already learned to protect myself at that point, I suppose. But my powers continue to grow stronger. Once I had the link with you to lean on, I was doing it unintentionally.”

“And when the support was gone suddenly because I’d left, everything went to Hell in a handbasket the first time you fell asleep.” Steve sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“So you cannot stay here with me,” she insisted. “Go back, send Vision, he isn’t as affected by my powers as humans are. If there’s ever to be any hope of me breaking this link, we can’t allow it to grow any stronger.”

“If what you’re saying is true, it sounds as though leaving you without _some_ kind of buffer to shelter you is a really bad idea,” Steve argued, uneasy with the thought. “Like you said, your powers are still growing. You’ll need that support, and it might as well be me. I can handle it.”

She made a frustrated noise, and red flared in her eyes. “Don’t you see? You’re only willing to do this because I want you to!” When he just blinked at her, Wanda clenched her fists. “If I’m already so deep in your mind, how can you trust any decision you make?”

The question left him speechless for a moment. Steve struggled to find a way to answer her, to put into concrete terms what he knew instinctively to be a fact. “Wanda, I’m _literally_ famous for my stubbornness,” he finally settled on, amused. “I saw you with Pietro. He wasn’t some kind of obedient slave to you. He still spoke his own mind and made his own decisions, didn’t he?”

“Aggravatingly so, sometimes,” she muttered, but there was a hint of a reluctant smile at the corner of her lips.

“I’ve never been a pushover, and even Bucky couldn’t sway me when I was set on something,” Steve continued. “I tried to volunteer for the army _five times_ before Erskine finally gave me a chance, lying and falsifying my records to make the attempts. And you know how I feel about lying.”

“I can’t even picture that,” she admitted, eyes wide. 

“That good memory I showed you was the result of me disobeying orders and sneaking behind enemy lines with nothing but a tin shield and a costume helmet,” he told her, shaking his head. “I was that determined to rescue Bucky and the rest of the men who’d been captured. Trust me when I say, I am not worried about you taking over my mind or forcing my decisions.”

Wanda chewed over that for a while, and he could see the conflicting emotions running through her eyes as well as feel them in his mind. If he was reading her correctly, she wanted to believe him, but was afraid to allow herself that hope for fear it would only be snatched away again.

Yet another thing they had in common. Steve knew that feeling, all too well.

“You don’t understand what you’re offering,” she said at last, almost despairing. “This isn’t for only a while. This would be for the rest of our lives. You’ll never have me _not_ with you. What happens someday when you find a woman you want to be with? What would she think of us coming as an inseparable pair?”

“Yeah, that’s not likely to be a problem,” Steve sighed. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, and she frowned at him.

“I know you think you can never have a home to go to, that you lost that chance to the ice,” she said. “I know because I helped to plant the thought in your mind, and I’m sorry for that. It won’t be true forever.”

“You don’t actually know everything about me,” Steve told her. “You and Natasha both. I didn’t give up on home and a family because of you. You just put the last nail in the coffin and made me face up to reality.”

“You’re lying to yourself because…” she started, and Steve got frustrated with the whole thing.

Reaching for that distant sense of her he’d discovered in his mind, he threw his thoughts at it, catching her hand in his at the same time because skin contact had strengthened the link last time. He felt Wanda slip into his mind almost unwillingly, his aggression catching her by surprise, and the memories rose up around him.

Every damn time a dame had turned him down, or given him a thinly veiled horrified look when she got her first glimpse of the friend Bucky had promised to bring, ran through his head like a movie montage. Then came the ones who had been _pitying_ , as if they thought they were doing him some kind of huge favour by letting him take them out. Not once, not _once_ before the serum had a woman ever looked at him and wanted him.

At least, none except Peggy. She’d seen into the heart of him from the very start, and Steve had fallen for her so fast because of that insight, it made his head spin. He didn’t know for sure if she’d have been willing to go dancing with him before the serum, but he thought she probably would have.

After the transformation… oh, _then_ the gals flocked to him, panting after him with lust and desire. Steve had looked into their eyes and known that they still hadn’t wanted _him_ , not really. They wanted the attractive outer package. They couldn’t care less about the skinny guy who remained inside that package. 

In his heart Steve would always think of himself that way. He didn’t want someone who was only interested because he was attractive. He wanted someone who would say ‘yes’ to the skinny guy.

And now, in the future, it was worse yet. The girls didn’t want Steve Rogers, they wanted Captain America. The hero, the Avenger. He could have been anyone at all inside, and they wouldn’t care.

He knew there were women out there who could see past that. Natasha was totally disinterested in outward appearances, because she understood better than anyone how meaningless they were. Better than anyone but Wanda, that was, because Wanda could literally see through the outer façade to the true person inside. They couldn’t be the only ones.

“But even if I had the spare time to find one of the exceptions, and court her,” Steve forced himself to say out loud, his voice a low rasp. “Seeing all of that, do you really think I’d be interested in any dame who wouldn’t accept you as part of the deal? She’d have to want _me_ , and that means understanding me well enough to know why you’re in the package along with the little guy.”

Wanda blinked up at him, the red glow in her eyes not quite covering the sheen of tears she didn’t shed. “They were fools, all of them,” she told him, almost as husky as he was. She’d turned her hand in his at some point, so their fingers were twined together. “They have no idea how rare it is to find someone like you. Most people, their minds are repulsive. They’re shallow, self-absorbed children, who believe they somehow deserve to have everything they want with no effort on their part, and throw tantrums when the universe fails to oblige.”

Steve’s lips twitched at the description, even as his heart felt heavy. He wanted to believe it wasn’t an accurate depiction, that there were more good people out there than bad. But he had to admit the sheer self-centered entitlement of the average person he’d encountered since waking up had shocked him.

“You, most of the other Avengers, many of the people at the base and in SHIELD, they’re different,” she acknowledged. “There are good people out there. But none quite like you. You gave Pietro and I a chance when nobody in their right mind would have done so. When we prevented Ultron from reaching you, you didn’t question whether we had really changed sides. You gave us a way to make a difference.”

“Oh, I questioned it,” Steve assured her wryly. “I just needed the help too badly if I was gonna have any hope of saving all those people. And by the time we got the train stopped, you’d already proven yourselves. Enough that I was willing to give you that chance.”

“Far more than the others would have done.” Wanda shrugged, a careless gesture that Steve could tell was hiding deeper emotions than she wanted to admit to. “You believed in us when no one else would.”

“And I know for a fact you’ve never once looked at me and cared about the pretty face or the muscles, so we’re even,” he said, squeezing her fingers gently.

“Pretty or ugly, big or small, the mind within remains the same,” she said. “Before the experiments, I would have cared. Now I know better. Of all the others, I think you are the only one I would be willing to be so close to.”

It occurred to Steve that she had, in fact, confirmed his assumption that she would be one of the girls who didn’t care about his outsides. And that Natasha might have been a tiny bit right about his developing interest.

Wanda had made the connection too, probably earlier than he had. Now she was looking up at him through her lashes in a way that he’d have labeled ‘coy’ on Natasha, but which felt closer to ‘shy’ on Wanda. Steve’s heart kicked abruptly into double-time, and he took a deep breath to try to calm it.

“Let’s concentrate on getting you sorted out and back on your feet,” he suggested, voice gone husky again. “Besides, I don’t think it’s gonna get as strong as you think. Pietro was your twin, and you were already close to him before you got your powers. You can lean on me, and I won’t let you suck me in, I promise. I’m willing to be your rock – and it’s not because you’re making me want to. ”

Not that the idea of being so close to someone wasn’t appealing. Having someone who would always be there to lean on, who would always stand up for him, who would always understand… he’d had that with Bucky, and he’d missed it desperately since the moment he’d lost his friend. Even if he did succeed in helping the other man to find himself again, Steve knew full well that their friendship would never, _could_ never be the same.

Wanda was suggesting that they could have something even better than what he’d had with Bucky. Part of Steve was railing at him for resisting the idea and turning her down, for insisting on digging his heels in and refusing to allow the deeper bond to happen. 

There were so many reasons why he couldn’t, and it only started with the fear that allowing himself to hope would result in that hope being crushed in the end. What they had already was more than Steve had thought he would ever find. 

“You’d better not regret it, because it will be too late to do anything about it by then,” Wanda murmured, and let go of his hand.

Without the contact his sense of her emotions faded again, but he thought it might be stronger than it had been to start with. She was right that this was probably going to draw them closer still over time, but he wouldn’t let it go too far.

Wanda might miss the depth of the connection she’d had with Pietro, but it sounded as if it was maybe a little _too_ deep to really be healthy. Steve would have to set boundaries, and be stubborn about preventing her from crossing the lines. It would be better for both of them, in the end. Besides, he couldn’t be that rock for her if he had no solid foundation of his own.

If he could manage to draw those lines, Steve was pretty sure he wouldn’t regret it. Being _needed_ and knowing there was something he could do to help was one of the best feelings he’d ever experienced, and its own reward.


	3. Chapter 3

“It’s so quiet,” Wanda remarked on the second day, standing in front of a window and looking out at the snowy landscape. She had her arms wrapped around herself, and it made her appear unusually fragile. “I’d forgotten what it feels like to be so alone in my head.”

Her tone was uncertain, almost apprehensive. “You don’t sound like you’re sure that’s a good thing,” Steve noted, coming up behind her. He put a hand tentatively on her shoulder, ready to pull back if she reacted badly, but he wanted to get a better sense of what she was feeling. Already he was coming to rely on this strange connection they had. It was certainly easier than trying to read her expression.

What he felt from her with the increased contact was loneliness so strong it was staggering. He could sense her reaching out, straining to touch someone, anyone else, and most especially looking for the one mind that was now forever out of her reach.

“It makes me wonder if all the rest of the world has only been a dream, and this is reality,” she said, shivering. He didn’t think it was from the cold, not with the bleak sense of desolation pouring off her. “I’m glad you’re here, or I think I might have convinced myself I was the only person alive.”

Damn. Steve had suspected it would be a bad idea to leave her entirely by herself, and now he knew how right he’d been. “Well, I _am_ here,” he reminded her, squeezing her shoulder gently. “You’re not alone.”

To his surprise, Wanda turned and pressed her face into his chest, winding her arms around his waist. After a moment of hesitation Steve wrapped her in an equally tight embrace. Again he could feel her reaching out, searching for her missing other half, and all he could do was silently offer his support instead.

“You don’t feel like he did,” she murmured, her eyes closed as she rested her cheek against him. “You don’t smell like him, either. Even your mind is nothing like his. And yet, this is the closest I’ve felt to Pietro since...” Her voice broke, and Steve brought a hand up to stroke over her hair.

“I’m glad I can help, even if it’s only a little,” Steve said, doing his best to concentrate on the idea that she didn’t have to suffer alone. This was exactly what he was here for, to be her support. If having him give her a hug made her feel better, it wasn’t exactly a hardship. He’d have done far worse if it helped.

“Ever the strong one,” she said, and looked up at him. There was no red in her eyes, so he knew she wasn’t actively using her powers, but he could feel her along the edges of his mind. And what he felt was a bewildering shift from relief to resentment. “Always the stoic, the hero. Selfless and self-sacrificing, taking nothing for yourself.”

It seemed like she was mocking him, and Steve’s shoulders went tight. He frowned down at her. “There’s no call to lash out at me,” he said. “I’m only trying to help.”

“I don’t need Captain America’s help,” she retorted, stepping away from him and breaking the contact. “This isn’t a problem he can solve.”

Wanda turned and... he didn’t want to say ‘flounced’, because she’d probably hit him if she heard him think it, but it was the only description he could come up with for the way she moved into the bedroom. She slammed the door behind her, making it clear his presence was now unwelcome.

Bemused, Steve stared after her, trying to figure out where the hell he’d gone wrong.

* * *

When Steve woke on the third night to the sound of her door creaking, he already knew what had driven her from sleep. Her prediction that she would bombard him with her dreams had proven to be true. Tonight it had been the memory of Pietro, gawky and too-thin at fourteen, shaking with fever and coughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. In the hellish way of nightmares Wanda had been scrambling to try to find something to make him better; medicine, food, more blankets, _anything_ , but everywhere she turned what she needed was out of reach. Her utter certainty that her brother would die if she didn’t succeed drove her relentlessly until finally the dream had ended abruptly.

The worst part was that Steve was pretty sure the frantic search had been all too close to reality. Though probably instead of one sequence, it had been long days of begging and pleading and watching every person who could help turn away from her.

He knew how bad refugee camps could get; he’d seen his share of them in the war. Sometimes it had been shockingly difficult to tell the difference between those and the HYDRA slave labour camps the Commandos were sent to liberate. Supplies were desperately short, there was never anywhere near enough of anything to go around. People went hungry, slept in the cold, and stumbled through the horror of their new lives with devastation and hopelessness in their eyes.

He also knew from reading reports about the Stark Relief Foundation that far too often, the charitable donations sent into places like that went astray. The food and medicine and clothing were snatched up by the people who ran the camps, used for their own comfort or sold on the black market to line their pockets, and never made it to the ones in need. Tony had people on the ground trying to make sure that didn’t happen, but it was never enough.

None of that knowledge made it any easier to bear the idea of a young girl terrified of losing her only family being refused the help she needed. If anything, it only made it worse.

“Hey.” His voice was hoarse with sleep and the scream she’d been suppressing through the whole dream. Steve hadn’t meant to startle her, but apparently she hadn’t realized he was awake because she jerked to the side and her hands came up defensively, already glowing red.

“Whoa, easy,” he murmured, pushing himself up to sit and raising his own hands in a gesture of surrender. “It’s only me.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” Wanda replied, letting the glow fade. “I wanted some water.”

“It’s okay,” he assured her. “I’d have woken up anyway, probably. That nightmare hit too damned close to home.” When she tilted her head at him, curious, he gave her a crooked smile. “I used to catch pneumonia every winter, like clockwork. Sometimes I wasn’t sure I’d make it through. I remember my mom scrambling around like that, trying to take care of me without missing too many shifts at the hospital. If she didn’t work she wouldn’t be able to afford food and medicine, but if she left she was always afraid she’d come back to find me already past help.”

Swallowing, Wanda nodded. “Every time I left our shelter, I feared it was the last time I would see Pietro alive. I was so frightened, and I didn’t know what to do.”

“But he survived,” Steve pointed out. Then he winced, because the words only seemed to highlight the fact that Pietro might have survived _then_ , but he was gone _now_.

Her chin rose, her expression defiant as she looked down at him. “I stole the medicine,” Wanda told him, daring him to scold her for the theft. “I waited until one of the charity supply trucks came, and I slipped past the guard and stole it from the boxes. Probably someone else died because I took it for him.”

“Or maybe someone didn’t make extra money selling it on the black market,” Steve replied. He could feel her anger at being forced to steal what was meant to be freely given, and it echoed his own. _She_ felt that echo, and it made her relax again, her eyes wide in surprise.

“I know you well enough now to be sure you didn’t take more than you needed,” he continued, holding out a hand to her. Her desperate desire for contact and comfort was catching, and Steve honestly wouldn’t mind some of that himself right now. After a moment of hesitation she moved forward and curled her fingers around his, even let him tug her down until she was sitting beside him on the couch.

That part was a little awkward, with him wearing only his boxers and the blanket around his lap, and her in a thin shirt-like garment that wasn’t nearly long enough to be considered a nightgown in Steve’s mind. Still, he wrapped his arm around her and tucked her close against his side. She sighed and rested her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes and relaxing further.

“I took food as well, and two more blankets,” she admitted, almost too soft to hear. “Far more than would have been our share.”

“Which doesn’t even begin to make up for all the shares you should have gotten and didn’t,” Steve countered, rubbing his thumb over the curve of her arm. “You did what you had to for the two of you to survive. I get it.”

“When we volunteered for Strucker’s program, we thought we would be able to make certain none of our people had to keep suffering that way,” she told him. “To ensure that no more children would starve and die because food and medicine were being kept from them. 

“And that right there is what makes you a good Avenger,” Steve said. “You were never interested in hurting innocent people. You wanted to protect them. You were attacking what you thought was the threat. The warmongers, the monsters. You were wrong, but as soon as you realized that, you changed sides.”

“It wasn’t all selfless, or even mostly,” she said wryly. “Don’t make me out to be the saint you strive so hard to be. We wanted revenge. We wanted Tony Stark and everyone near him to suffer as we had suffered, tenfold.”

“I know.” He shrugged with one shoulder, the one she wasn’t leaning against, not wanting to jostle her. “Part of me wishes that Zola wasn’t dead, so I could get my hands on him and make him hurt like Bucky did, make him pay for all the good SHIELD agents who died trying to help me stop Insight. Like you said, we’re not saints. What makes us heroes isn’t that we’re paragons of virtue. It’s that, given the choice between having that revenge and saving other people, we’ll set the revenge aside. You were willing to work alongside your worst enemy to save the world. I’m honestly not sure I could have done the same.”

“You would have,” she said with absolute certainty. “You _did_. You let Pietro and I help with no hesitation, even after what I did to you and the others.”

“Because you stepped in to try to help people,” Steve said. “I’m not so sure I’d have been willing to work with the Red Skull if he’d showed up with a weapon that would destroy Ultron, for example.”

He turned his head, resting his cheek on her hair. She smelled good, as always. It was a spicy scent with no hint of the tang of chemicals that seemed to lace everything in the modern day, and it was unlike anything he’d encountered with anyone else. He thought it might be a by-product of her powers.

Sometimes he wondered if scent mattered as much to other people as it did to him, or if it was something that he’d developed because of his enhanced senses. He hadn’t really been able to smell much of anything most of the time before the serum, thanks to his sinusitis and near-constant colds. Whatever the case, he was more than happy to enjoy the scent of her now, and the warmth of her body against his.

Through the link he felt Wanda absorb his sense of quiet contentment, allowing his emotions to wash through her for a change, helping her mind settle. He also felt her deep exhaustion; she hadn’t exactly been sleeping well since she’d lost control of her powers from the concussion, to say the least. She slipped into a doze so quickly he didn’t even have a chance to suggest she get more comfortable.

Oh, well. She’d have a crick in her neck tomorrow, probably, but he was pretty sure she’d count that a small price to pay for some decent sleep. Maybe there was even a way to keep her from sliding back into another nightmare.

Smiling a little to himself, Steve focused on the best memories he had of his mother. The way she’d fussed over him, working so hard to make sure he had everything he really needed. The special dinners she’d scrape together the money for on his birthday and at Christmas, things that people nowadays would consider nothing worth mentioning but which were the highlights of his year. The times she’d sit propped up against the headboard of his bed with him cradled against her chest, like he was doing with Wanda now, when his asthma or coughing got so bad he couldn’t lie down for fear of suffocating. The lullaby she used to sing to him, whenever he couldn’t sleep.

When he drifted off as well it was with the sound of his mother’s sweet voice echoing inside his head, and in Wanda’s, too.

* * *

There were some difficulties to sharing a small space with a woman that Steve hadn’t really considered when he’d decided to accompany Wanda to the cabin. The only women he’d spent any length of time in close proximity to, other than his mother, had been Peggy and Natasha.

With Peggy it had been in the field, surrounded by other men, and she’d probably been the one who felt awkward. Assuming it had bothered her at all, which wasn’t exactly a safe assumption. With Natasha it had been on missions when they were holed up somewhere for a period, and his mind was focused on the job.

This was definitely the first time he’d ever forgotten to bring fresh clothes with him when he went to take a shower, while there was a woman potentially standing between him and the rest of his things.

Cursing under his breath, Steve leaned his forehead against the door and resisted the urge to bang it a few times for good measure. Wanda had still been asleep when he eased out from under her to hit the bathroom, so he hadn’t thought anything of crossing the short distance in only his boxers. That meant he now had a choice between dirty underpants or a towel to go back out there in.

Maybe she was still asleep? Closing his eyes, Steve both listened hard and felt tentatively out along the link between them. He still wasn’t very good at the latter, especially when they weren’t in contact, but he was learning. There were no sounds in the main room that he could hear, and all he could get from Wanda was a kind of sleepy contentment and a sense of warmth.

Drowsing in the first sunbeam of the morning, maybe. The front window faced east, and the sun had woken him every morning so far. If he was very quiet and fast, he might be able to grab his pack and get into his jeans behind the cover of the back of the couch before she woke enough to see him.

On the theory that it would be quicker to get into new clothes if he could pull the fresh underwear straight on, Steve wrapped the towel securely around his waist rather than donning the dirty boxers. He’d just have to move fast, before she got up.

Except, as he discovered the moment he opened the door, she was already up. The sleepy contentment and warmth was what she felt as she took a sip of coffee, apparently, because that’s what she was doing. From the kitchen area she had a straight line of sight to the bathroom door, and she smirked at him over the mug when she caught sight of him.

From past experience, Steve knew his fair skin would do absolutely nothing to hide the flush he felt sweep over his cheeks. Not that it mattered whether it was visible or not – his embarrassment carried clearly through the link, and he sensed her answering amusement.

“Don’t mind me,” she invited him when he froze in the doorway. “Carry on. It’s no worse than what you were wearing last night when I joined you on the couch.”

The reminder was _not_ helping, because remembering cuddling against her while they were half naked sent a jolt of heat through him that had nothing to do with his blush. Steve bit his lip, fighting the reaction. The towel was a decent size, but if he got hard it would be immediately obvious.

Of course, once again it didn’t really matter if he could hide it or not, because she picked up on _that_ from his mind, too. Worse, she responded with an interested heat of her own, an oddly reluctant curiosity that sent little tendrils licking along their bond and twining into him.

Desperately Steve tried to shut it down, block her out. He heard the wood of the doorframe groan a protest, and realized he’d grabbed hold of it as an anchor and was squeezing far too hard.

The sting of her anger and hurt at the rejection of her interest slashed down the link at him, obviously something she’d deliberately projected. Steve winced. “Damn it, Wanda, I’m not trying to offend you, it's...”

“It's what?” she demanded, scowling at him. She set the mug down on the counter and put her hands on her hips, which only accentuated the way the thin material of her sleep shirt clung to her curves. “Are you so insecure about the idea of someone admiring your body instead of your heart that you can’t bear any attention at all?”

“No, it’s not…” Steve searched for words to try to explain, and couldn’t come up with any. Failing that, he tried to solidify his feelings to send to her, but that didn’t really work either. The problem was that none of his reasons for shutting down were anything he really wanted to discuss, with her or anybody else.

“It’s inappropriate,” he finally settled on. “That’s _not_ what this is supposed to be about.” It was about helping her to regain her mental feet, making sure she had whatever support she would need in the future. It wasn’t, couldn’t be about personal desires, especially not for him.

Seeing that Wanda was still glaring, and feeling the pointed stabs of indignation she continued sending to him, Steve struggled to elaborate. “Look, it’s not that I don’t think you’re gorgeous. Er, not that beauty would be the first factor. You _are_ , I mean, but there’s a lot more to it than that.” Damn it, he was tripping over himself again. Apparently he was simply incapable of discussing either attraction or dating with any woman in a coherent fashion.

“It’s not that I wouldn’t want to date you,” he tried, marshalling his thoughts as best he could. He did his best to project his sincerity, hoping it would reach her despite his clumsy words. “But this is a working relationship, and it’s best we keep it that way.”

Any hope that he might manage to soothe her was lost when she tossed her head, flipping her hair over her shoulder in a gesture that perfectly matched the disdain and resentment he could feel from her. “The paragon returns. And here I thought last night was a sign that you weren’t hiding behind him anymore. If you wish to keep things professional, I suggest you avoid parading about in a towel in the future.”

“Wanda…” Steve started helplessly, trying to find something to say to cool her anger. This wasn’t how he’d wanted this conversation to go, at all. Well, he’d rather have avoided the conversation entirely, but he’d never meant to hurt her.

Once again Wanda disappeared into the bedroom rather than answering him. This time she didn’t bother physically slamming the door, just flipped her hand at it in a contemptuous gesture that made it fly shut on its own. The noise it made reverberated in the quiet air of the cabin, and resonated inside Steve’s heart as well.

Why did she get so mad at him sometimes for trying to help her? And yet other times, like the night before, she was willing to come close and be comforted. Was she shying away whenever she realized she was dropping her guard more than she wanted to?

It sure seemed like she was mad at something _he_ was doing, though. Not for the first time, Steve reflected that Peggy’s statement in London was no less true now than it had been seventy years ago. Obviously, he still didn’t know a bloody thing about women.

At least this one wasn’t shooting at him for it.

* * *

“Overall, things are going smoothly here,” Natasha summed up her briefing, smiling at him through the video conference Steve had set up on the laptop he’d brought with him. “Nothing has come up that we can’t handle without the two of you. I don’t think anyone is missing you playing drill sergeant, though. Sorry.”

“I’ll find a way to live with the devastation,” Steve replied, lips quirking as he fought down a grin of his own. “Tell them I expect their average times, weights, and reps to be at least the same or better when I get back, or they’ll be doing extra sessions.”

The first Avengers group hadn’t really _trained_ as a team, but they’d fought together so often they’d become one anyway. When he and Natasha had stepped up to run the second team, however, Steve had been determined to do things right from the start. He’d discovered a certain pleasure in working as a trainer, pushing his teammates to their physical limits and expanding those limits in the process. Even better were the exercises he and Natasha had devised to help them learn to work and think as a unit instead of a group of individuals.

They complained, of course, same as the men he’d gone through Basic Training with had complained about their drill sergeants. But Steve knew the others appreciated the difference it made to their strength, speed, and stamina in a battle.

“Oh, that should make them eager for your return,” Natasha chuckled. “Any idea of your ETA?”

“It’s going pretty well,” Steve admitted. “We took a short trip in the Quinjet to the nearest town today for some supplies, and Wanda didn’t have any trouble handling the extra minds. The nightmares have been getting better, too; she’s not projecting out of control when she sleeps.”

“The headaches are almost gone,” Wanda added from the other side of the table, where she was idly playing yet another game of solitaire to keep herself occupied. “I’ve been feeling much better. I think Steve was right, and I wasn’t healing properly because of the pressure of so many minds against my own.”

“Another couple of days ought to do it,” Steve concluded. “Maybe an overnight trip into town to be sure.” He hadn’t yet told Natasha about the connection between him and Wanda or the way Wanda was now using his mind to lean on when things became overwhelming. That was a conversation he wanted to have in person and in private, because he had a nasty feeling it was going to go badly.

“We’ll be glad to have you back, but don’t rush,” Natasha said. “I think this is the closest thing to a vacation you’ve had since they pulled you out of the ice.The break's probably doing you as much good as her. Sounds like you two aren’t sick of each other yet, at least.”

She was smirking, and Steve knew she was still hoping he’d end up in bed with Wanda before their ‘vacation’ was over. He rolled his eyes at her, and Natasha folded her hands together and leaned her chin on them, her expression only turning all the more smug. Sighing, Steve shook his head. “You need anything else from me?”

“Nope. But I expect a full report when you get back - and I’d better not be disappointed with the contents,” Natasha warned him, wiggling her fingers at him in a sort of wave before she reached out to end the connection.

“She’s trying to set you up with me, isn’t she?” Wanda asked, a mixture of amusement and annoyance reaching him through their connection.

“To be fair, she’s tried to set me up with pretty much every available female to cross my path,” Steve sighed, rubbing at his temple where a headache was forming. That was often the result of talks with Natasha, he’d found. If it wasn’t because of her teasing him, it was trying to follow her twisty thought processes that caused the effect.

Wanda laughed, and he sensed it was as much a reaction to feeling his frustration and aggravation as at his words. Steve found himself smiling back at her, the amusement catching. 

“Do you need to work on anything she sent you?” Wanda asked, sweeping the cards on the table into a messy pile. “I’m bored, but I don’t want to disturb you.”

“Nah, nothing that can’t wait,” Steve said. He considered the deck of cards, but he had to admit he was getting pretty tired of playing card games. Especially since most of the interesting ones were bluffing games, which he refused to play against her. She’d sworn that she wouldn’t cheat and use her powers, but the fact was, she really didn’t need to. He was only good at bluffing when someone’s life was on the line and it was absolutely necessary.

A storm had rolled in overnight and was only starting to fade, so going outside for some exercise and fresh air wasn’t an option. “We could watch a movie,” he finally suggested.

“A movie? How?” Wanda blinked at him, turning her head to scan the walls. There was nothing to see, because the TV was cleverly hidden away behind one of the paintings over the mantle.

“Oh, crap, didn’t I show you the first day?” Steve felt chagrined at the oversight. He’d assumed that she hadn’t been watching anything from lack of interest, because she rarely did back at the base. It was another trait they shared. Neither of them had grown up with television being used as an unpaid child minder, as so many people seemed to do now, so it didn’t tend to be their first choice of entertainment.

Steve still loved cinema, though. Movies had changed a hell of a lot since the 40s and televisions had barely existed, so it was fascinating to see how far things had come. On nights when he had no missions, wasn’t too restless to sit still, and didn’t feel like reading the internet or a book, he’d indulge himself with a TV or movie marathon.

Better yet, movies and TV series had been an excellent source of information on modern society. Starting with old films and shows and working his way up through the decades had given Steve a pretty good appreciation for how things had changed over the course of time. It made the modern world not seem so abruptly, glaringly different from his own when he could understand where the differences came from.

He gestured for her to sit on the couch, and hunted down the remote control before he joined her. It had taken the SHIELD agent who checked in on him several visits to get Steve comfortable enough with the technology to use it, but once he had he’d taken frequent advantage of it.

Wanda blinked when the picture flipped up to reveal the screen, and grinned when Steve turned it on and revealed the extensive list of movies available. He didn’t know if it was connected to the internet or only a computer with a lot of hard drive space, but it didn’t really matter.

“What would you like to watch?” he asked. “I’m not a big fan of action movies as a genre, gotta say. If I want hours of explosions and gunfights, I’d go on a mission.”

“Sometimes it might be nice to have the excitement without it being a life or death situation,” Wanda said thoughtfully. “But no, I don’t think I would like them either. Too close to home.”

“The few I have seen are so over the top and _wrong_ about nearly everything, it drove me crazy,” Steve chuckled. “I spent half the time wanting to crawl through the screen and give them a lesson in basic tactics and strategy. So what do you want?”

“I don’t even know enough to pick anything,” Wanda admitted, shaking her head. “Show me your favourite?”

The request made Steve hesitate, because... well, his actual favourite was kind of embarrassing. He hadn’t been self-conscious about it until Clint found out what it was and proceeded to tease him for days, but now he was gun-shy.

Apparently ‘romcoms’, as Clint called it, weren’t the sort of thing you expected big, muscular guys to go for. While they were supposedly what women liked to watch, his favourite, The Philadelphia Story, was from 1940. As much as Steve appreciated how far movies had come, they weren’t the same as the ones he’d grown up loving.

Unfortunately, that seemed to mean that the ones he’d grown up loving were boring and dated to most people these days. Wanda might be a little more receptive simply because she didn’t have as much exposure to modern Hollywood, but it could feel trite and clichéd to her as well.

Maybe it would be better to pick something more likely to appeal to her tastes...

Something warned him, the barest edge of annoyance ghosting along their link. Frowning, Steve looked over to find Wanda watching him warily, eyes narrowed. “What?” he asked, startled by the sudden change. He hadn’t even _done_ anything this time. “If I don’t show you my actual favourite, you’re going to storm off again?”

“He can be taught!” Wanda exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “It’s a miracle.”

“What the hell is your problem?” Steve demanded, scowling at her and not making any attempt to keep his irritation and frustration from spilling through the link. “Half the time you act like I’m the enemy, and the other half you want to get closer. And you seem to go from one to the other in a blink!”

“My greatest fear is that I will influence you without either of us ever realizing it, and cause you to be what I want you to be regardless of your own wishes,” she replied, glaring right back. “You know this. So why do you continue _trying_ to be what you think I want you to be, with no care or thought for yourself?”

Stunned, Steve blinked at her a couple of times, thinking through the implications of that. She was right. It _was_ kind of a stupid thing for him to be doing, in the context of their worst-case scenario. Burying his own desires beneath his duty, whatever that might be, had become an automatic reflex for him at some point.

“This is for the rest of our lives,” she continued, warming to the topic. “You can’t only give me what I need forever. There must be balance or we’ll crash and burn. Besides, when you suppress yourself, it gives me a headache, like nails scraping over the inside of my skull. I don’t want to be linked to Captain America. I want Steve Rogers, but I think now that even you don’t know who he really is anymore.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” he admitted, sighing. “Sam asked me once what makes me happy, and I couldn’t answer him. I still can’t, beyond ‘helping people’.”

“Then let’s find out, together,” Wanda suggested, catching his hand in hers and holding tight. “We can start with your favourite movie.”

Through the contact he could feel her aggravation at him, with genuine concern underlying it. Beneath _that_ was her very real fear of taking him over too subtly for them to notice, and Steve felt bad again for feeding into her worry.

She was right that he couldn’t make this solely about her, as he’d been trying so hard to do. There were still lines he couldn’t cross, but there had to be _some_ kind of give and take. There would be in any other kind of relationship, after all. If he were simply providing emotional support as part of a friendship, he’d be letting her do the same in return.

He’d wanted that from the start, but hadn’t been allowing himself the indulgence. The problem was, as she’d pointed out, it wasn’t an indulgence. It was a necessity.

It _would_ be nice to have someone worrying about him for a change.

“All right,” he gave in on the question of the movie, as a way of avoiding the larger issue for a few moments longer. “I’ll show you my favourite. Don’t say I didn’t warn you if you find it boring and trite.”

“I won’t,” she said with absolute conviction. “I’m sure I wouldn’t anyway, but _you’ll_ be enjoying it, and I’ll feel that.”

Shifting, she curled up against him, much as she had been the other night. Steve put his arm around her without thinking about it, and once again found a sort of quiet contentment within him at having her close. He hadn’t realized how much he missed casual, affectionate contact. Bucky had always been touching him – punching him on the shoulder, slinging an arm around him, ruffling his hair.

Having Wanda against him wasn’t the same, but in some ways it was even better. And that was kind of the problem, right there.

“Is this all right?” she asked, probably sensing his apprehension at the increased contact.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” he confirmed, holding her tighter for a moment. “You’ve got a point. This needs to be a relationship, not only a responsibility. But it can’t be more than friendship, Wanda.”

She frowned, and he felt her probing at him to try to find the reason behind his words. “Hey, don’t do that,” he scolded her. “You don’t have a right to _everything_ I’m thinking.”

“Sorry,” she apologized, and he could sense genuine contrition. “It’s habit. I’ll try to remember not to. Is it because of her? The woman in your dream?”

Peggy. She meant Peggy. Swallowing, Steve forced himself to relax again, because he’d tensed up the moment Wanda mentioned the dream she’d forced on him. “Partly,” he admitted, and his voice came out hoarse. He coughed, clearing his throat.

“You still love her,” Wanda said softly, leaning her head against him.

“I always will,” Steve replied, and he didn’t even try to hide his love for Peggy and regret for their missed chance. “The same way you’ll always love Pietro.”

“And you think that because you lost her, lost that chance at making a home and family, you should give up on those things forever?” she asked. “As I had given up on ever having anyone I could be nearly as close to as Pietro? But now I have you. It’s not the same, but it’s good. I think it will still get better, if you let yourself want it to.”

“It’s good,” Steve acknowledged, resting his hand on her shoulder. “Maybe it can be better. But it can’t be everything.”

Even if he was increasingly wishing it could be.

* * *

_“Are you ready for our dance?”_

_Steve turned, and there she was. Amidst the raucous crowd of frantically merry people, she was an oasis of calm happiness. Her eyes sparkled with joy and relief that they’d made it through, that it was all over and now they could have the reward they both deserved so much. Her smile lit up the room and put the brightest of the flash bulbs to shame, and it made him want to kiss that rich red colour right off her lips._

_Peggy. Bright and beautiful and bold, the only woman he’d ever loved._

_His heart lifted as it always did when he saw her, but something churned in his gut, making him feel sick. Steve tried to shove it aside, ignore it, not wanting to allow it to ruin this moment. This moment he’d waited **so long** for._

_Why did the sickening certainty that he’d lose everything the instant he touched her hand keep stabbing into him?_

_“The war is over, Steve. We can finally go home,” she told him, clearly excited by the thought. “Imagine it.”_

_Steve didn’t want to imagine it. He wanted to experience it, with her. Firmly refusing to acknowledge the panic rising within him, he took her hand and led her onto the dance floor at last._

_And she didn’t disappear._

_The panic subsided, replaced by shock and disbelief, but he pushed those aside too. The only thing Steve wanted to focus on was the feel of her warm, lithe body against his and the sweet, heady scent of her..._

_Only, she smelled like she’d come off a battlefield five minutes ago. Gunpowder and blood, mostly. It was the same scent she’d always had on the rare occasions he’d been able to kiss her before, but he’d expected a hint of soap and maybe some perfume for their date._

_“Did you get into a fight before you came over here?” he asked, blinking in surprise. “Why do you smell like you came straight from a mission?”_

_“Honestly, Steve,” she laughed. “I know you’re not very good at flattery, but even you should know better than to tell your date that she smells bad.”_

_“What? No, that’s not... I didn’t mean...” Flustered, Steve stumbled over an attempt to explain._

_Something scarlet caught his eye in the sea of army khaki and other subdued colours. Steve turned his head to find a woman standing alone among the merrymakers. She was out of place; her clothes were strange, too tight and too revealing, with a bright red jacket over it all that was what had grabbed his attention. When she caught him looking, a determined expression crossed her face and she faded back into the rest of the crowd. Steve stared after her, frowning. She seemed... familiar..._

_“Wan...”_

_“Are you all right, darling?” Peggy asked, catching his chin in her hand and returning his attention to her. Steve lost the train of whatever thought he’d had a moment before. “You seem distracted.” She smiled at him, teasing. “Am I not enough to hold your attention after all?”_

_Steve shook his head to try to clear it. The last thing he wanted was for Peggy to think he was losing interest. “Sorry, I... I’m not...” He couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that something was **wrong** , no matter how he tried._

_“Clearly, I need to try harder,” Peggy said, and slid her hand around to the back of his neck. She rose up on her toes and tugged him down at the same time, and Steve’s heart pounded faster still as he leaned in to kiss her._

_But his instincts were shouting at him, and Steve turned his head in the last moment before their mouths met. Looking over Peggy’s shoulder, he saw the woman in red once more, biting her lip in consternation as she flicked her fingers at him in a dismissing gesture._

_Almost, Steve turned away again. Almost, he let Peggy draw him into that kiss after all. Almost._

_**No**._

_Digging in his metaphorical heels, Steve pulled away from Peggy entirely. She protested, trying to cling to him, but Steve set his jaw and refused to let her force his attention back to her. His eyes were fixed on the woman in red, determined to keep her from disappearing or distracting him this time._

_“Wanda,” he said, using the word as an anchor to force himself..._

...back into reality. Snapping his eyes open, Steve lunged up off the couch. He caught Wanda by surprise; she’d been kneeling beside him, hands hovering over his head as the red glow of her powers gave the room a Hellish look.

Grabbing both her wrists in one hand, Steve slammed Wanda onto her back on the floor and pinned her arms above her head, his knee wedged into her abdomen to drive the breath from her and keep her in place. “What the _hell_ do you think you’re doing?” he snarled down at her.

He could feel Wanda’s pain through the link, could tell he was holding her wrists too tightly, putting too much of his weight on her. Right at that moment, Steve really didn’t care. He countered her pain and panic with his seething rage and betrayal, pushing them at her through the link as if it was another way to crush her.

“I was trying to help,” she protested, struggling to squirm free of him.

“Help?” he repeated, incredulous. “ _Help_? You thought throwing that in my face again would help... how, exactly?”

“No, I didn’t cause it,” she insisted, her voice high and tight with pain. “You were already dreaming. I was trying to fix it, to take away the distress I caused in the first place.”

Fix it? Breathing hard, Steve stared down at her. He did have the dream more often than he liked to think about, and it always went the same way it had the first time. He’d turn to take Peggy’s hand, and it would be as though a strobe light was flashing. Light off, he was spinning her onto the floor, taking the first steps into the life he’d always wanted. Light on, he was standing in an empty room, surrounded by the echoes of his empty life in reality.

This time, the strobe hadn’t turned on. He’d been able to stay with Peggy, start that dance, almost kiss her. The room had never emptied.

Honestly, Steve wasn’t sure which was worse. In the end it was still snatched out from under him; he’d only had a chance to get deeper into the joy of it before being cheated of the prize.

If Wanda truly hadn’t caused the dream in the first place, if she’d only been trying to help... Maybe. Steve wasn’t entirely convinced.

Slowly he released her, shifting so his weight wasn’t on her before sitting back on his heels. “What. _Exactly_. Were you trying to do?”

Coughing, Wanda sat up gingerly, eyeing him warily like she thought he might punch her next. Well, fair enough. He _was_ kind of fighting the temptation, and she could doubtless feel that in his mind.

“I thought, if I could give you the resolution... make it so the loss wasn’t so abrupt, so glaring...” she trailed off and shook her head, and Steve could feel a mixture of concern, hope, and remorse pouring off her. Concern for him, for the way she felt he’d shut himself off from any chance of having the things he’d once wanted so badly. Hope that if she could only ease that pain, he might be willing to open up and consider the possibilities of his life again. Remorse for the agony she knew she had caused him in the past.

If he hadn’t been able to feel Wanda’s emotions so concretely, he might never have been able to forgive her or move past the betrayal. But she really had been trying to help.

“I trusted you,” he growled, narrowing his eyes at her. “I trusted you enough to be willing to be your shelter, your rock to lean on. To let you into my mind, share things with you I’ve never shared with anyone else. You threw that back in my face.”

“How is it any different from when you pushed thoughts of your mother at me while I slept?” she objected, reeling back from his accusations. “I heard the echo of her singing in my dreams that night. You kept the nightmares away. I was trying to do the same!”

“What I did was use our link to try to balance the darkness of your nightmares with the light of some of my best memories,” Steve retorted. “I gave that to you freely, and your mind made use of it. I wasn’t trying to _change_ you. After all your talk about how you don’t want to accidentally turn me into something I don’t want to be, force me to do things I don’t want to do, here you are deliberately manipulating me to accomplish exactly that.”

“That’s not... it isn’t... I didn’t...” For once it wasn’t Steve tripping over his verbal feet. Wanda seemed to be having trouble forming complete sentences, and the struggle within her between horror and regret was so strong it was almost enough to make _Steve_ feel sick. She could feel him, too, so she knew how mad he really was, how much he meant every stinging word.

“If you ever do something like that again I will not only ban you from the Avengers, I’ll make certain you never have another chance to come near me,” he told her, willing her to sense his sincerity. “My mind is my own, and I will not put up with anyone trying to make it otherwise. I’m willing to _share_ it with you, not _give_ it to you for your own use. Understand?”

“I am sorry,” she said, subdued. “I truly was trying to help.”

“I know,” Steve acknowledged. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be giving you a warning, we’d already be done. Don’t do it again - this isn’t baseball, you don’t get three strikes before you’re out.”

Swallowing, Wanda nodded. “At least there is one good thing to come from this,” she said. He gave her a disbelieving look, and she shrugged. “You broke free. No one has ever done that, before. I don’t think I _could_ control you by accident. Influence, maybe, but not control.”

That made Steve huff, not quite a sound of amusement but something approaching one. “Well, I did warn you,” he said, and the tone of his voice no longer matched the temperature outside. “I’m famous for being stubborn.”

“How did you do it?” she asked, tilting her head at him, curiosity and a hint of annoyance reaching him through the link. 

Hesitating, Steve considered whether it was a good idea to tell her what had made him realize something was wrong. It might mean she’d be able to avoid the problem next time, and convince him if she tried again.

In the end he decided that he either trusted her, or he didn’t. And he needed to trust her, if they were going to live like this. “She smelled wrong,” he admitted. “Like she’d just come out of a battle. So I mean, it’s what she always smelled like, but it wasn’t what I was expecting in that situation.”

“Ah.” Wanda sighed, and looked rueful. “I can’t create anything, only pull existing memories from your mind and combine them in new ways. Most people don’t pay attention enough to notice such small details, but you’re too observant.”

She reached out, obviously aiming for his shoulder, and Steve debated whether he should let her make the contact. It would increase the connection between them, and presumably that was why she wanted to do it, but for what purpose? She could already tell what he was feeling.

In the end he allowed it, mostly because he wanted to see what she intended. When her fingers brushed his skin he felt a surge of regret and a sincere offer of - and request for - comfort. Wanda searched his eyes, and he could tell she was deliberately not prying into his thoughts and feelings, respecting his boundaries.

Sighing, Steve reached out in turn and gathered her into a hug. They both needed the reassurance that all was not lost between them. She shuddered and melted against him, arms sliding around his neck to cling tightly.

“We’re okay,” he assured her, easing back to lean against the couch for support as he cradled her close. He was almost getting used to this, holding her in varying states of undress. This time he didn’t even have the blanket, and he was grateful that the dark echoes of the dream kept him from focusing too much on how good she felt. “I appreciate that you wanted to help, Wanda. You went about it in the worst possible way, though.”

“Never again,” she promised, her voice muffled against his shoulder. “I would never have tried to do that to Pietro. I shouldn’t have tried with you. It’s only that I felt responsible for the pain in the first place.”

“I told you, you’re not the one who convinced me my priorities needed to change,” he reminded her, stroking her hair with one hand. “You were the last straw, that's all. Stop blaming yourself, or you’ll go crazy.”

“Crazier, you mean,” she corrected him, and Steve laughed despite himself.

“I think you kinda have to be crazy to want to be an Avenger, by definition,” he said, and she chuckled as well.

“I wish you would not refuse any possibility of something more for yourself, ever,” she said. Her concern for his happiness was real, but he could sense disappointment beneath it that suggested there might be selfish reasons for her desire to help him as well. “Do you really think we can be as close as this is making us, and not have our thoughts turn to that?”

“I think this can be whatever we choose to make of it,” Steve replied. “It’s not exactly an inevitable conclusion. The last person you were connected to was your _brother_ , and that worked fine.”

He caught the first hints of her reaction, the barest flash of longing and grief and... something, but then it was gone. Wanda had shut down the link, slammed it closed like she’d slammed the bedroom door before.

Steve blinked, feeling like she’d slapped him. Hell, if that was how it felt to her when he’d blocked her out over the towel incident, small wonder she’d gotten so upset at his rejection. “What...”

“I should go,” she said, pulling away from him. “Unless you’re planning for us to fall asleep on the floor, this time?”

“No, but...” Steve was confused and dismayed by the sudden reversal. He hadn’t gone self-sacrificing again on her, had he? He was pretty sure he hadn’t been doing the duty-before-desire thing she objected to so strongly.

“If you continue to find reasons to hold me while we’re undressed until I fall asleep, I’m going to be forced to question your insistence that you wish to be nothing more than friends,” she told him, and there was humour in her expression. If he’d been able to feel it as well as see it, he’d have believed that she was only withdrawing because of the line he’d set, and it would have been a valid reason.

Problem was, Steve couldn’t sense anything from her at all. A few weeks ago that would have meant nothing, but now it was a pretty strong indication that she was hiding something much deeper. Had she fallen so desperately in love with him that she couldn’t stand the thought of not having more?

No, he’d have sensed _that_ in her as soon as it happened, he was pretty sure. Wanda was attracted to him, although sometimes he thought it was a strangely reluctant interest. She was coming to care for him on a personal level, as he was coming to like and appreciate her. That was still far from being unrequited love, though.

So why did it feel like she was running away?


	4. Chapter 4

_Sex had always been good between them, both of them caring as much about what the other wanted as fulfilling their own needs. She couldn’t remember anymore when they had first turned to each other for comfort and discovered desire instead, but it didn’t really matter._

_They’d been separated for the experiments, weeks of agonizing distance and aching loneliness. Now he was here with her at last, the first moments of privacy they’d had since it all began._

_And now, oh, now everything was different. Now she was inside his head as much as her own, and she could feel everything she did to him as if it was her body she was touching. It was strange and foreign and exciting, literally mind-blowing. She wanted to touch and taste everything, to find out what it was like for him when she did._

_Better yet, she could share what she was feeling with him. His hands on her had always felt good, amazing, but now he was learning **exactly** where and how to touch her. He fumbled at first, surprised by the unfamiliar sensations, but with every touch he grew more confident._

_It became a race to see which of them could find the best places first. She bit his lower lip; he cupped her breast in his palm and they both moaned at the feel of her stiff nipple caught between his fingers. He licked at the shell of her ear; she dropped her hand to curl around the hard length of his cock and gasped as she felt how sensitive it was. She stroked her thumb over his weeping slit; he slipped two fingers inside her and he was the one who cried out at the sweet fullness._

_More than anything in that moment she wanted to feel his cock in her, to know what that was like for him and let him experience was it was like for her. She didn’t think they were going to last that long, though. Not when everything was so fresh and new, as if it was the first time they’d ever discovered pleasure and it was too overwhelming to comprehend._

_It all felt so good, even better after so long apart, and she couldn’t stop herself from stroking his cock faster, harder, pushing him closer and closer to the edge so she could feel it with him. He curled his fingers up, finding that spot inside her quicker than ever before and driving her higher with every nudge and flick, rocking the heel of his hand against her clit for the extra stimulation._

_Then he grinned and pulled away, and her furious curses turned to a gasp as he shifted down to bury his face in her. He’d been good with his tongue before, willing to listen when she told him how best to touch her, but now he didn’t need her instructions. With the sensations shared between them he was able to experiment to find exactly the right speed, the right pressure, the right motions. She had to bite her hand to keep from screaming, afraid someone would come to check if she did, but the moans spilled out anyway._

_She was close, so close, but he was keeping her poised right on the edge, trembling and panting and oh, God, she couldn’t wait to return the favour because it was going to be so good they might both die of it._

_Then he pushed that little bit more, flicking his tongue over her clit and flinging her over the edge, and she cried out his name as she came. “Pietro!”_

Abruptly Steve found himself awake and back in his own body, flushed and sweating hard despite the cool night air. He’d gotten twisted up in the blankets, face down on the couch, with his hips driving the achingly hard length of his dick into the cushions in stuttering, awkward motions.

Groaning, he forced himself to stop, clutching at the blankets and panting for air. He was so close to the edge and he needed release so badly, with the last moments of the dream playing over and over in his mind.

He’d never much thought about what it would be like for a woman, beyond assuming they got as much out of sex as the guy did if it was done right. Now he didn’t have to think about it, because he knew. It was a strange, uncomfortable knowledge that left him aching with a phantom emptiness, but Goddamn, it had been good. Too good, but to get off on such a private, personal memory not intended for his viewing struck him as a violation of Wanda’s trust in him.

Desperate for something to cool him off, Steve rolled off the couch and lurched across the room. If the whole place hadn’t been designed as a futile attempt to contain the Hulk, he’d probably have wrenched the door right off its hinges. As it was, it crashed into the wall forcefully enough to rattle the reinforced windows.

The bitterly cold winter wind whipped around him, filled with the astringent scent of pine and the sharp smell of the snow itself. Goosebumps rose all over his body, bare everywhere but the scant area covered by his boxers, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Staggering a few steps to the nearest tree, he collapsed down to his knees in the snow drift, welcoming the icy chill against his overheated skin.

Ordinarily Steve would rather shoot himself in the foot than throw himself into the snow, but these were special circumstances. Gulping down frigid air, he struggled with his body for control.

“Steve?” he heard Wanda’s voice behind him, confused and edging towards frightened. “What is it, what’s wrong?”

When he tried to answer nothing came out but a helpless moan. The last thing Steve wanted was to talk to her right now. Not until he could look at her without the remembered sensation of her brother’s tongue against her flashing through his mind, making his dick jump in eager response. Leaning his head against the tree, letting the bark dig into his cheek as sort of anchor to his _own_ body, he waved a hand in a gesture meant to warn her off.

It didn’t work, because Wanda was much closer when she spoke again. “What in the world happened? You bolted out as if the cabin was on fire.”

“Just... just give me a minute,” Steve pleaded breathlessly, finding his voice. It was husky and deeper than normal, but there was nothing he could do about that.

“Why are you in the snow?” she insisted, right next to him now. “You hate being cold!”

Through the connection between them he felt her reach out, concerned. Steve tried to block her, to shut her out as he had once before, but his thoughts were too jumbled to allow him to concentrate enough. There was no way to hide what was bothering him, either, not when the burning heat of desire was probably branded deep into his mind.

He knew exactly when Wanda discovered what had set him off, the memory of her own dream reflected back at her, because she gasped and he could sense her horror and dismay. It turned quickly to anger and defiance, and she threw the emotions at him as though she was daring him to judge and shame her.

“Wanda,” he choked out, but she turned on her heel and fled back into the cabin. Steve heard the door slam shut behind her, and he prayed she hadn’t actually locked him out.

He needed to follow her, get this sorted, but there was no way Steve could have any kind of serious conversation in this condition. It probably would have been fastest to take care of it, but with Wanda’s emotions still seething at the back of his mind he thought that might not really be a good idea. Presumably she could feel _him_ as easily as he could her. It seemed even more like it would be a violation now that he’d seen her reaction to his invasion of her privacy.

Still breathing hard, he concentrated as hard as he could on baseball stats; the most mundane, unarousing thing he could think of. Between that and the freezing cold his erection subsided, but he was shivering badly by the time it did.

Finally Steve was able to push himself back to his feet, teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. Even with his heightened ability to withstand extremes he was freezing, extremities long since gone numb, and he needed to get back inside and warm up.

Thankfully when he tried the door it wasn’t locked. Wanda was nowhere to be seen, but the bathroom door was ajar and the bedroom was shut, so he assumed she’d retreated to the latter. There was a back door, but he didn’t think she’d have left entirely.

At least, he really hoped she hadn’t.

Steve took a moment to pull on warm clothes, feeling as if he was donning a kind of armour. It was no real protection against anything, not even embarrassment, but it would make focusing on the upcoming discussion easier.

He didn’t try the door. Whether she’d locked it or not, it was _her_ space and he had no right to force his way in. Instead Steve knocked, leaning against the wood to allow him to catch any sounds from within. “Wanda? C’mon, let me in. Or better yet, come out here. Please?”

There was no answer. He could hear her inside, at least, her breathing erratic as she struggled with the defiance and despair he could feel roiling through their link. That sense of her was stronger than it had yet been, so powerful he almost thought it was active and open until he realized he couldn’t reach her through it in return, which meant the emotions must be overwhelming.

Her fear of his response to the dream made Steve want to reach out to her all the more. The past week together hadn’t only brought them closer psychically; the more he’d gotten to know her on a personal level, the more he was impressed and amazed by her strength of will and character. He genuinely liked her, had grown comfortable and relaxed in her presence, and she’d coaxed him into opening up almost as much as he’d done with her.

He didn’t have to hide from her, because there wasn’t any _way_ to hide. There was no point in trying to live up to Captain America’s strong, stoic image, because she could see right through it and she continued to call him on it. For the first time in far too long Steve Rogers was the one living his life, not Cap, and he hadn’t realized just how much of a difference it would make.

The thought that Wanda now believed she had to hide from _him_ , that he would reject her after she’d shown him such acceptance... Steve found the idea alarmingly painful.

Fine. If he had to convince her through the door, he could do that. “What is it you’re so afraid of? You really think I’m going to judge and condemn you? You know me better than that, or you damn well should after this week.”

At last she answered him, and her voice was hoarse as if she was fighting back both tears and anger. “How can you not? I know what people think of it. I don’t care, I never have, but if you say one word against us...”

“Wanda,” he exclaimed, sharp and impatient. “Will you please stop panicking and making assumptions for five seconds? Use your powers, look for yourself. I’m _not judging_.”

The connection between them deepened further, proving Steve’s suspicion that she’d been forcefully blocking him out to avoid what she’d assumed would be his reaction. She searched his mind for what she expected to find, and came up empty.

He heard her footsteps, and moved back from the door as she opened it. Wanda was rumpled and tousled, dressed only in her nightshirt, apparently woken from deep sleep by his abrupt exit. Well, obviously, since she’d been the one dreaming. Red flared brightly in her eyes and around her hands. Her posture was aggressive, weight balanced on the balls of her feet as if she expected to have to attack or defend at any moment.

“How can you not?” she demanded again. “You, of all people. I know how you feel about those who do ‘wrong’...”

“Yeah, well, you seem to be missing the part where ‘wrong’ is defined as ‘hurting other people’,” he interrupted her. “You and Pietro weren’t hurting anybody. He was literally all you had, I get that. I won’t say it’s not a disturbing thought, and probably not a choice I would’ve made, but that doesn’t mean it was wrong for you to make it.” 

“If it truly doesn’t bother you, why could I feel how upset you were out there?” she countered, frowning at him but starting to believe that he wasn’t going to reject her or turn on her after all.

Steve grimaced, embarrassed all over again. He couldn’t quite meet her eyes when he answered. “It was... it was _weird_ , okay? The dream was from your perspective, that was... uh, kinda alien. Not to mention I was intruding on something private, it’s not as though you meant to show me that.”

And also not to mention that having her see him in that state, aroused and desperate and shaking with lust, was pretty damned mortifying all by itself. She’d probably pick that part out of his head, too, but there was no way he was going to say it aloud.

Surprise widened her eyes, and then her frown melted into a reluctant smile. “I suppose that’s a fair point. But you realize, that won’t be the last time it happens?” The smile twisted, and she gave him a sardonic look. “Do you understand now what you’ve gotten yourself into? There will be no such thing as privacy between us.”

Closing his eyes, Steve swallowed hard. His body tried to stir again, but he willed the reaction away forcefully. No, that hadn’t really occurred to him. And it wasn’t only that he would feel her dreams, but presumably any time she, well... girls did that too, didn’t they? He realized he didn’t actually know the answer, but he assumed they did. Hell, she was going to sense it any time _he_ did.

Steve might be chaste, but he was far from being a saint. His own hand was the only relief he ever got, and one of the downsides to the serum was that _everything_ got ramped up and amplified. Food wasn’t the only thing his body now craved more of. The idea of never being able to touch himself again was pretty awful, but how could he when he knew she’d be ‘watching’?

Although, if she was going to get half as much out of it as he had peeking on her dream, it might not be such a turn-off... and God, if sharing her dream had felt that good, imagine what it would be like when she... no. Damn it, _no_. It was still a violation and invasion of her privacy.

Of course, it wouldn’t be if she said it was okay... how the hell had he allowed his mind to get onto this track in the first place? Now he was starting to get hard again, and no amount of willpower was going to stop it from happening.

“Pietro and I were already that close when I got my powers,” Wanda murmured, softer and closer than she had been. When Steve looked, she was standing right before him, inches away, head tipped back to meet his eyes. “But I think after, it would have been inevitable, siblings or not. How could we feel that from each other and not be drawn together? Now...”

She reached out to him, and Steve hastily caught her hands in his. As always the contact pulled him further still into their link, and he could nearly taste her desire and loneliness and need for touch. Fighting to keep his breathing from growing ragged, he held her as carefully as if she was made of the thinnest of eggshells. “You’re still grieving for Pietro,” he reminded her, and no matter how much he tried he couldn’t stop his voice from going hoarse. “I’m not really the one you want.”

“I thought I would never have someone again, because I would never find someone I could trust enough to be willing to allow inside me so deeply,” she replied, and the heat in her eyes was a match for the fire in his body. “How could I settle for anything less, after feeling that with him? It’s been months. I still ache for him, I always will. The hole he left in my life can never be filled. But I’m discovering that doesn’t mean I must be always alone.”

It was a desperate struggle for Steve to stop his hands from tightening around hers as his heart raced and desire burned through him. The implied offer behind her words wouldn’t have been hard to read even if he couldn’t sense her intent, and God, he wanted to take her up on it so badly. She was strong and brilliant and independent, everything he’d loved in Peggy and been attracted to in Natasha. More importantly, she saw _him_ , Steve Rogers, and that was the part of him she wanted.

Now he knew why the interest he’d felt from her had been so tentative and almost reluctant; it was the first time she’d felt desire for anyone other than Pietro, and the first time she’d felt desire at all since his death. It must have felt like a betrayal of Pietro’s memory for Wanda to allow herself to want Steve. No wonder his rejection of her had stung so badly.

And now he was going to hurt her all over again, if he wasn’t very careful. He couldn’t just brush it off this time, couldn’t dodge the issue. He had to make her understand that he wasn’t refusing her out of anything other than absolute necessity.

“It’s not going to happen, Wanda,” Steve said. ‘Regretful’ didn’t even begin to cover it. “I can’t be that for you. Your friend and support, yes, but not your lover.”

“I know you desire me,” she shot back at him, frustrated and, sure enough, hurt. “Why do you keep pushing me away? I’m everything you say you want, and you’re the only one I _can_ want.”

“It can’t happen,” he insisted, anguished. “You don’t understand. I’ll hurt you. The last girl I had a date with ended up in the hospital. I broke her hipbone.” Broke it, hell, he’d cracked it in three places, squeezing too tightly.

That had been the farthest he’d ever gone with anyone. She’d been a pretty waitress with sharp, intelligent eyes and flawless skin the colour of coffee, making her legs look even better against the white dress she’d worn for their date. She’d flirted with him every time Steve went to his favourite cafe in DC, funny and cheerful and genuinely sweet, and as far as he’d been able to tell she hadn’t figured out that he was Captain America. It wasn’t that he’d hidden it, exactly. He just hadn’t been able to resist the chance to know that someone wanted him for something more than his job title.

Against his better judgement she’d enticed him to come back to her apartment after dinner, and he’d kept himself under control just long enough to get her out of that dress. She’d been wearing honest to God garters beneath, and the sight had driven the breath from Steve’s chest and made him forget to be careful for one critical moment when he reached for her to pull her close. 

Needless to say, there hadn’t been a second date.

The two attempts before her had gotten away with nothing worse than vivid bruises the shape of his hands, but then he hadn’t been as into them to start with. He’d been forcing himself to get out there, as Natasha kept nagging him to do. Although the kissing was good enough to excite him, there had always been that lingering doubt at the back of his mind as to whether they were really interested in _him_.

A stab of pain radiated through him from their link, and Steve cursed silently as he realized he’d gripped Wanda too tight after all. Releasing her hastily, he took a step back to put himself firmly out of range. “You see?” he said, referring both to the images playing back in his mind and the pain he’d caused her.

Wanda rubbed her hands, frowning thoughtfully at him. Now that she understood he wasn’t rejecting _her_ , the frustration had faded and he could feel her shock and sympathy. “You only need practice to learn to control it,” she objected. “I’ve seen you handle delicate things, many times.”

“Sure, when I’m calm.” Steve blew out a heavy breath, shaking his head. “Adrenalin interacts with the serum, causes the effects to spike. SHIELD tested it pretty extensively. The worse the battle, the stronger and faster I get, and that’s good. Problem is, fighting ain’t the only thing that gets my blood up. I’ve got the same problem Banner does, just on a smaller scale.”

“That’s...” she couldn’t seem to find the words to describe her reaction, and Steve knew how she felt. “You’ve _never_? Not even before the serum?”

“You saw the way the dames looked at me, back then,” Steve reminded her. “The few that would’ve been willing, it’d have been nothing but...”

“A pity fuck?” Wanda suggested dryly, when he hesitated.

“I was looking for something less crude, but yeah,” Steve replied, equally dry. “Pretty much. I never got a chance to do more than kiss Peggy. In hindsight, that’s probably a good thing. Lack of medical facilities being what they were in the field, I might’ve killed her instead of only hurting her.”

It was a thought that still haunted him, sometimes. He’d regretted for so long that they’d never had a chance for more, but when he’d realized how dangerous he really was, the regret had been joined by fervent gratitude.

“What about restraints?” she suggested, still sympathetic. “It would be not so _much_ fun, perhaps, but better than hurting your partner. Surely SHIELD is capable of creating them strong enough even for someone like you.”

“Yeah, they are.” Steve’s voice turned hard, and he couldn’t stop the surge of resentment and sense of betrayal that swept over the link to her. “I’ve had them used on me, multiple times. Can’t say I’m a big fan as a result.”

She met his pain with warmth and understanding, helping to thaw the chill in his heart caused by the memories. Having his brothers in arms turn on him, men he would have _died_ to protect, wasn’t one of the shining moments of Steve’s life. He didn’t think the associations would ever make it possible for him to find being handcuffed appealing.

After a moment of thought, Wanda appeared to come to a decision. She moved towards him again, and when Steve tried to step back he found himself held in place by wisps of red. “It’s all right,” she soothed him, and simply wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned into his chest, as she’d done several times before. “I thought you were holding back, still denying yourself. Can’t we at least have this much?”

Sighing deeply, Steve gave in and slid his arms around her in turn. “Yeah, we can have this much,” he replied. “I’m sorry. I probably should have just been up-front about it.”

“No more than I should have told you about my real relationship with Pietro,” Wanda said, shaking her head. “There is a difference between something that is secret, and something that is private. This, both of these, are private things.”

Somehow her words made it easier to breathe. Steve exhaled on a shudder, and pulled her closer still. He’d been thinking he was a hypocrite, given his repeated chastising of his teammates for keeping secrets, but he felt as though she’d touched on the truth of it. Private, not secret. It was a small difference, maybe, but an important one.

“I feel bad that I didn’t realize how intimate this would be,” he said. “I was thinking of it in terms of you needing to find someone who’d accept me in your life, like you said the first day. I didn’t mean to put you in a position where you’d never be able to have someone, without warning you that it couldn’t ever be me.”

“Well, I _could_ still, if I found a third person I could be so close to. It would be very uncomfortable for you, though,” she pointed out with warm humour. “I already knew that I liked and trusted you, or I’d never have formed the connection in the first place. After this week I care for you, and I think… I think I could come to love you. I never thought I would have that again. I can live without sex, for that.”

“I feel the same about you,” Steve admitted. Wanda felt good against him, solid and warm and real. He wanted to kiss her so badly, and being able to sense her eager response to the impulse wasn’t helping his self-control any. “This is going to be really damned difficult,” he sighed, lifting a hand to stroke her hair.

“We’ll make it work,” she proclaimed, resting her cheek over his heart. “We’ll have to. I told you that it would be too late to back out if you stayed.”

“I don’t want to back out,” he acknowledged at last, closing his eyes and breathing in the subtle, spicy scent of her. “I haven’t felt so... _myself_ as I have this week in a long, long time. This isn’t only for you, not anymore.”

He needed her, too. Needed someone to keep him grounded, to be able to relax and be himself around, and not have to worry about what others would think. Until she’d given that to him, Steve hadn’t realized how _much_ he’d needed it. During the war he’d had Bucky, who unlike the others hadn’t been following Cap, but rather the punk kid from Brooklyn who didn’t know when to quit.

Living up to Captain America’s image had been difficult enough back in the forties, but he’d awakened to discover that seventy years had immortalized the legend into something impossible to aspire to. Nobody could be that virtuous, that selfless, that pure of heart. Still, Steve felt he had to try, and sometimes it seemed the weight of it would crush him. Wanda allowed him to set that burden aside for a while, just as Bucky had.

She wasn’t going to consume or control him, Steve was now certain of that much. He’d managed to set the most important of those boundaries, even if she was breaking through others to prove that he’d never truly wanted them to be there in the first place. 

No, Wanda wasn’t going to bind him in the chains of her wants and desires.

She was going to set him free from the wants and desires - and constant demanding expectations - of everyone else.


	5. Chapter 5

As the Quinjet came in for a landing at Avengers base, Steve could feel Wanda’s increasing apprehension and tension. She’d handled the overnight trip to the town well enough. The population wasn't significantly smaller than that of the base, but it also hadn’t _mattered_ as much if she could handle it or not.

“You’ll be fine,” he murmured, smiling at her as they headed for the exit.

Wanda nodded, but her breathing was too fast and she had a pinched look around her eyes. Dropping his bag, Steve reached out and put his hands on her shoulders, bracing her. She shuddered and lifted one hand to close over his.

The sense of her in his mind strengthened abruptly, far beyond anything he’d felt before. For a moment Steve was startled, but then he remembered the way Wanda had described retreating into Pietro’s head to escape the pressure inside her own. Closing his eyes, Steve concentrated hard on the idea of welcoming her and providing shelter, and felt her gratitude in return.

“I’m all right,” she finally declared, his awareness of her fading back to normal. He opened his eyes to see that she still looked tense, but not as panicked. “Thank you.”

“Hey, you got this,” he encouraged her, and her answering smile was only a little shaky.

Slinging his bag over his shoulder, Steve rested his other hand at the small of Wanda’s back, keeping them connected in a way that looked as though he was politely escorting her, rather than her leaning on him for support. By the time they hit the bottom of the ramp the last traces of panic were gone, and he could feel her confidence surging as her mental shields held strong.

Natasha was waiting for them to disembark, and of course she took one look at their body language and smirked. She didn’t say a word, but she made no attempt to hide the smug satisfaction written all over her face. It was clear she was congratulating herself on having successfully set him up at last.

“Don’t start,” Steve warned her as soon as they were close enough not to have to shout. Sometimes it seemed as if those were the most common words he spoke to her.

“I didn’t say anything,” Natasha protested, laughter ringing in her voice to match the amusement sparkling in her eyes.

“No, but you were thinking it really loudly,” he grumbled.

“Unless Wanda’s powers are catching, you can’t possibly know that for certain,” Natasha replied.

This time it was Wanda’s turn to try to ease his apprehension. Steve wasn’t really looking forward to the coming discussion, because he had a pretty good idea of how Natasha was going to react.

Studying the two of them, Natasha’s smile slowly faded. “They’re not catching, right?” she asked, obviously picking up on his tension and realizing it had something to do with her comment, but unable to believe she could have accidentally struck on the truth.

Wait. Obviously? Nothing about Natasha’s emotions was ever obvious. Blinking, Steve looked from her to Wanda. “Are you…?”

“It seems a fair trade,” Wanda shrugged. “Why should I be the only one who benefits?”

“Well, stop,” he told her, though he appreciated the thought and knew she’d feel that. “I don’t want to become reliant on you and forget how to read people myself.”

“Have you ever been able to read Natasha?” she replied with a laugh.

“Not the point,” Steve insisted, but he matched her affectionate amusement with his own rueful acknowledgement.

By this time Natasha’s smile was gone, and she was well on her way to a frown. “What the hell is going on?”

“We need to talk. My office,” Steve said, which cemented the frown in place. He caught the suggestion of a question from Wanda, and shook his head. “No, you go ahead and get unpacked. I’ll see you later.” A wisp of worry reached him, and he managed a small smile. “It’ll be fine. Go.”

With clear reluctance Wanda nodded and headed down the hall towards the personnel quarters. Steve turned the other way, towards the ‘business’ end of the complex, not bothering to check if Natasha was following. He knew there was no way she was going to wait one second longer than necessary for this explanation.

She made a brief attempt to detour into her office instead, but Steve ignored her and went straight to his own door. He wanted every advantage he could get for this discussion, and that included being in his own territory. Natasha would undoubtedly see the tactic for exactly what it was, but it would still make him feel more secure.

“Okay, what the fuck was that all about?” she demanded the moment the door closed behind her. “She’s not telepathic.”

Dumping his bag on the floor next to his desk, Steve leaned against it and crossed his arms. The parallel between this and the conversation they’d had when deciding to send Wanda to the cabin didn’t escape him. Somehow he doubted there was going to be any teasing this time.

“It’s not telepathy, more like... connection,” he said, searching for the right words. English – hell, any language on the planet – didn’t have terms for the concepts involved when discussing the way Wanda’s powers worked. No language had ever needed to develop terms for that.

“Turns out the reason she lost control after I left the base is that we’d ended up linked during the building collapse,” he continued, watching Natasha’s frown continue to grow deeper with every word. “She didn’t realize she’d done it, or that she’d been using it to lean on me for support when the pressure got to be too much, so when I was suddenly out of reach her shields gave out.”

“Okay, I’ll buy that,” Natasha said, eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t explain the not-conversation the two of you had back there. You weren’t doing that before this trip.”

“Before this week the link still wasn’t very deep, and neither of us was aware of it,” Steve replied, shrugging. “She hasn’t been entirely stable since she lost Pietro, we knew that.”

“I’m not sure she qualified as entirely stable before that, either,” Natasha muttered, and Steve shot a glare at her.

“What we didn’t know was that she’d been using Pietro’s mind as a sort of buffer between her and everyone else,” he continued, refusing to validate Natasha’s comment by responding to it. “Without that support, Wanda’s been slowly growing overwhelmed as her powers continue to increase. The concussion only sped up the process.”

“So now she’s using you as a buffer, without even bothering to ask?”

“She didn’t know it was happening,” he reminded her. “Once she did, she warned me that if I chose to stay there with her, it would get deeper and there would be no going back. I made that choice.”

“Which means she’s got an _unbreakable_ mind link to you at all times?” As he’d anticipated, Natasha wasn’t at all happy with the implications of that. “You didn’t think to maybe consult me before you made a decision like that? Because this definitely impacts the team, Rogers, so don’t even tell me it’s private.”

“How is this any different from what would have happened if things had fallen out the way you were hoping?” Steve countered. “Do you really think Wanda could have a relationship with anyone and _not_ end up connected to them? You’re the one that was throwing me at her, so what did you expect?”

“I may not have thought it through completely,” Natasha said, though she didn’t look pleased at being forced to admit the oversight. “I was too excited by the fact that you were finally showing interest in _somebody_. The difference is, I thought that interest on your part was genuine, but if it didn’t happen until after she’d already created this connection, then she’s essentially forcing you to…”

“Don’t even go there, Romanoff,” Steve interrupted, his voice turning cold. “She’s not forcing me to do anything. I told you, I made the choice, knowing what I was getting into.” Not quite the whole truth, but close enough for the purposes of this conversation. Natasha didn’t need to know about the unexpected wrench the link had thrown into his non-existent sex life.

“How can you be sure of that?” she retorted. “How can you trust any decision you’ve made since that building came down? She could be influencing you, if not outright controlling you – without even realizing it, if you want to be generous.”

Damn it, this was exactly what Steve had been afraid of; that Natasha would jump straight to the same worst case scenario Wanda had, the idea that she would end up overwhelming and overpowering him. He understood why Natasha, of all people, would be most concerned about the possibility. She had far too much experience with mental manipulation, and she’d been the hardest hit out of all of them by Wanda’s powers. Not to mention all the time he knew she’d spent putting Clint back together, after Loki.

Really, it was a miracle Natasha was willing to work with the other woman in any way, let alone trust Wanda at her back. All had been forgiven between the two of them, but definitely not forgotten.

“I’ve proven I can break loose if I have to,” Steve assured her. “She tried to mess with my dream, fix the damage she’d done before, and I caught her at it and got free. I pulled myself out of _her_ worst nightmare in the building collapse, too, remember. That’s why I was the one who went with her in the first place. She’s not controlling me.”

Studying his expression, Natasha shook her head slowly. “Are you even listening to yourself? She’s already tried to mess with your head once to suit herself, and you think that’s proof it’s going to work out? You’re compromised, Rogers. If you weren’t, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because you’d be acknowledging the problem.”

“What, so now every time you and I disagree, it’s going to be Wanda’s fault?” Steve asked, incredulous. “Because we never argued before she came along? Give me a break, Nat. You can’t blame us butting heads on her. She was trying to _help_ , I told you. She feels guilty about what she did to all of us, you know she does.”

“You’re on the inactive list as of right now, both of you,” Natasha declared, ignoring his words. “And you’re staying off duty until we can figure out a way to break this link.”

“Leaving Wanda with no support,” Steve retorted. “She needs somebody to lean on, or she’s going to end up in the Fridge when she loses control. Not only am I the person best qualified to be able to resist exactly what you’re afraid will happen, I’m also the only person she trusts enough to allow that close.”

Seeing that the argument wasn’t getting through to her, Steve growled. “For Christ’s sake, Natasha. She could have been influencing and controlling us both from the minute she walked onto the base, and you know it. We _talked_ about it when we decided to confirm her as part of the new team. We decided, you and I both, that it was worth the risk because we trust her. Because she’d _earned_ our trust. How has this changed that risk in any way?”

Licking her lips, Natasha considered the question. “It’s…” she started, but then scowled and cut herself off as she continued to think. She speared him with a sharp look. “You really broke free of her. She didn’t just let go?”

“She was actively trying to keep me in it, at the cabin,” Steve told her firmly. “And in the building collapse, her subconscious was trying so hard to drag me under it was like fighting a riptide. I’m not saying it would be impossible for her to mess me up again if she really wanted to. We both know that would be a lie. But I don’t think it could happen by accident. So it still comes down to a question of trust. What’s different since we took her on that makes you think she’d control me now?”

Finally Natasha sighed, exasperated. “All right, nothing has really changed,” she acknowledged. “It would be easier for her to manipulate you now, but it’s not like it would have been difficult to start with. But I’m going to be watching you, both of you. At the _first sign_ you’re acting irrationally or becoming dependent on her to make decisions, I’m pulling the plug.”

“Good. That’s exactly what I was going to ask you to do,” Steve said. If the situation hadn’t been so serious, he’d have been amused by the startled look she gave him in response. “I’m not refusing to acknowledge the possibility. Wanda’s worried about it too, that she could influence me without us realizing it. I don’t think it’s the absolute certainty you seem to believe it is, that's all.”

“I hope that’s true,” Natasha said, and her smile was decidedly grim. “Because this is going to end up being a clusterfuck of stellar proportions if it’s not.”

The problem was, Steve knew she was right. So he was going to have to make sure it didn’t come to that.

* * *

Surprisingly, not much changed because of Steve’s new relationship with Wanda. The biggest differences were the amount of time the two of them spent together, and their increasing disregard for personal space between them. She continued to prod him sharply anytime he slipped into what she called ‘Hero Mode’ when they were off duty, and the result was that Steve remained more comfortable and relaxed than he could remember being in a long time.

He made a point of taking her out to dinner and other ‘date-like’ activities. She laughed and protested that it wasn’t necessary, but at the same time he could feel her pleasure at the attention. Wanda had even less dating experience than he did, which startled him until he thought about it. The only person she’d ever been with was Pietro, and considering how close they’d started out it had probably never occurred to them to go on anything like a date.

All in all, it was the best time Steve had ever had in his life. There was only one significant fly in the ointment. He was damn near convinced he was going to die an early death from sheer sexual frustration. 

He’d gone the whole week at the cabin without any release, too aware of her presence and the lack of privacy even before he’d realized the consequences of the link. And of course once he _had_ realized, he’d been far too embarrassed to even think about it.

Well, no, that wasn’t true. He’d _thought_ about it plenty. He wasn’t willing to _act_ on it, knowing she’d be aware of every moment.

Which meant the only relief he’d had in two weeks was the second night after returning to the base, when he’d awakened to sticky sheets after another heated dream of Wanda’s. Two other times he’d woken up before the end of the dream, and though he’d been sorely tempted, he hadn’t finished himself off either time.

She’d sensed his tension, of course, and she’d made it clear that she didn’t mind or think of it as an invasion of her privacy anymore. Even so, Steve couldn’t bring himself to follow through. Not only would it be embarrassing to him to have an ‘audience’, so to speak, but he knew it would essentially be teasing her with what she couldn’t have.

His resolve was rapidly weakening, however.

On duty, he could mostly forget about it, focusing on whatever he was supposed to be doing at the time. After hours it was more difficult, especially because neither of them wanted to deny themselves _all_ forms of touch. The tingle of sexual awareness was always there, and it was getting progressively harder to ignore.

Even so, Steve found himself craving contact with her, and he knew Wanda felt the same. If they were near each other while off duty they were usually touching, and they were almost always near each other.

At night, though… God, he was almost coming to dread the nights.

Lying on his back in bed, naked on top of the covers – he was so sensitive to touch at this point he couldn’t even bear his shorts or the sheets – there was nothing to stop Steve from obsessing about it. He’d ruined two blankets already, twisting his hands in them until they tore in an effort to keep from giving in to temptation.

He kept as tight a stranglehold on the link as he could, but he knew some of it was leaking through because he could feel her answering frustration, which didn’t help much.

After an hour or two of that each night the need was so intense it became physically painful. It was a fire burning in his groin and a feeling as if something was squeezing his nuts, like a muscle cramp that never went away. Steve had heard guys complain about ‘blue balls’ before, especially during the war, but he’d never experienced it himself. Until now, he’d honestly thought it was mostly exaggeration or a rotten excuse to try to convince a dame to put out.

Probably it _was_ nothing but that a lot of the time, but he’d never again doubt that it truly existed. It was better than a kick in the crotch, but not by much.

Finally on the eighth night back at the base, Steve couldn’t take it any longer.

He waited until he was certain Wanda was asleep, figuring that if it led her into an erotic dream she might not realize the cause was _him_. Shuddering with agonizing need and breathless anticipation, he reached down and caught his aching dick in his hand. 

Heart pounding, shivering as the cool night air touched the sweat that had sprung up all over his body, Steve forced himself to take it slow. If he was going to give in to temptation, he was damned well going to get as much out of it as he could. He worked his hand up and down his shaft, rubbing his thumb over the crown every time he got to the top. Soon he was panting, blind with pleasure as his hips jerked up into each stroke, and it didn’t matter how slow he went because he wasn’t going to last more than a few minutes.

That was probably for the best if he didn’t want to wake Wanda up, but God, he wished it could go on forever. The burning fire in his groin was growing ever more intense, but now it was pleasure instead of pain and the tension inside him was winding tighter, tighter, tighter…

Turning his head, Steve muffled his cry in the pillow as he came. Semen hit his stomach and chest in sticky ropes, and _finally_ the pinched, aching feeling in his balls eased. He kept stroking, a light touch now to draw out the last few moments, until finally he couldn’t bear any further stimulation.

Groaning, Steve rolled over onto his side to reach for a tissue to clean himself, and…

_…curled up, hand tucked between her thighs to plunge two fingers inside her. She sensed his startled presence and welcomed him in, letting him slip into the spaces of her mind and join her inside her body until he was so deep he was essentially sharing her awareness._

_She was unbelievably wet, throbbing with need after so many nights lying in bed caught in his battle between desire and embarrassment. For that matter, she’d barely done this at all since Pietro’s death. It had felt too agonizingly lonely not to have him with her when she came, and she gave in only when the need grew too strong. The dreams of him weren’t much better, but this, at least, she’d had control over._

_But now Steve was there, where Pietro had once been. Although in some ways it seemed like a betrayal, it also made her feel nearly whole again. As mournful and bereft as she felt to have someone other than Pietro in her mind while she did this, at least she was no longer alone._

_She wanted Steve’s mouth over hers, his fingers on her clit, his cock deep inside her. He picked up the images of her fantasies, and she felt his silent moan echo inside her skull. She couldn’t have him, but she could at least have this now that he’d given in._

_Sobbing with pleasure, little panting cries that grew louder with each stroke of her fingers inside, she rocked her hips to grind her clit against the heel of her palm. Curling her fingers up, she brushed against the place inside her that sent a sharp sensation of ecstasy shooting through her, and that was enough to push her over the edge._

_Gasping into the pillow, she kept her fingers inside until her body stopped clenching around them, and only then reluctantly drew them away. With a wicked smirk she licked at them, and felt him shudder in response as he…_

…came again, pressed tight against the mattress with one hand wrapped around his dick, the other clenched around the bedframe so hard the metal groaned in protest. Or maybe that was just Steve, because the rough tightness in his throat suggested he’d been making quite a lot of noise for the last few minutes.

Completely wrung out by the second orgasm, he sprawled over the bed in a boneless heap, uncaring that he was lying in the cooling mess he’d made. He felt dazed, almost as if he was in shock, too drained to move. In the back of his mind he could sense Wanda still there, smug and self-satisfied, enjoying the combination of his release and her own.

That had been… God, if he’d thought sharing Wanda’s dreams felt strange, it was nothing to the bizarre sensation of essentially inhabiting her body as she did that. Everything he’d felt had been foreign, almost alien to him. It had also been one of the most incredible experiences of his life.

A soft chime rang in the air, the alert that someone was trying to reach him through the comm system. “Are you kidding me?” Steve mumbled, burying his face in the pillow. There was no way in hell he wanted to talk to anyone right now. Even if he kept the video off, if it was Natasha she’d figure out in a heartbeat what he’d been up to, and he’d never hear the end of the teasing.

When he summoned the energy to turn his head and look at the wall unit, though, it was Wanda’s name displayed. With an effort Steve reached out and touched the panel, accepting the call. The holograph resolved to show Wanda curled up in bed as well, sheet draped over her body in a way that did nothing to hide her sweet curves. The hazy, sated look in her eyes sent a tendril of desire shivering down Steve’s spine despite the impossible double release he’d already had.

“Calling to gloat?” he asked, trying to ignore the warmth he could feel flaming across his cheeks.

“I thought you were never going to give in,” Wanda complained, stretching in a way that drew his eyes straight to her chest. Which, he was pretty sure, was exactly what she’d intended the move to accomplish.

“Nothing was stopping you from doing whatever you wanted,” Steve pointed out. His mouth was dry, but swallowing didn’t seem to help.

“I knew you were ashamed,” Wanda countered. “I didn’t want to torment you. In another day or two, though, I think I might have stopped caring.”

“I thought you were asleep,” Steve muttered, shifting to lie in a cleaner spot on the bed. He knew he ought to wash up, change the sheets, but he was too lazily content to want to do anything but lie there.

“I was, until you started,” she laughed. “So does this mean you’re over the embarrassment?”

“No, I’ll still be embarrassed as anything,” he assured her with a sigh. “I’m probably not going to let it stop me again, though. Not if it feels like _that_.”

“Just because we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we can have nothing at all,” she said, her voice as close to a purr as he thought a human could come. Then it softened, turned wistful. “Stay on the line? I want to fall asleep with you there.”

Steve considered the request, sorting through what he was sensing from her as well as her words and tone. Yearning, mourning, loneliness, heartbreak… she and Pietro had always slept together, long before they’d been doing anything more than sleeping, he knew that. Even with the bond Steve now had with Wanda, he was pretty sure he couldn’t really understand how cold and lonely her empty bed must feel to her now. 

“So what are you doing all the way over there in your quarters, then?” he asked. She blinked at him, startled, and he smiled. “Not sure I could punch my way out of a wet paper bag right now, you’ve got me so limp. As long as we don’t get carried away in the morning, I think it’ll be safe enough.”

Her eyes lit up - in the normal sense, not the way they did when her powers kicked in. She scrambled up out of the bed, and Steve got a very tantalizing glimpse of bare flesh before she shut down the video.

Groaning, he hauled himself to his feet with an effort. There was no way he was going to ask her to sleep in a mess like the one he’d left all over his bed.

By the time his door chimed softly, Steve had pulled on a pair of boxers and was tucking in the last corner of the sheets. “Let her in,” he instructed the computer, and a moment later Wanda was standing there in his bedroom doorway. She was ‘dressed’ in a sleeping shirt similar to the one she’d worn at the cabin, and Steve blushed again at the thought that she’d gone down the hall to his quarters dressed in nothing but that.

To Hell with it. Everyone knew they were together at this point. Let them gossip. It was her reputation at stake, so if she didn’t care, Steve wouldn’t either.

He wasn’t sure which of them moved first, but they met somewhere in the middle. She wrapped her arms around him to clutch at his back, and he cupped her face in his hands to tip it up for a kiss. Their first kiss, sweet and warm and soft. There was a faint taste of something unfamiliar on her lips, and Steve groaned when he realized it was _her_ , from when she’d licked her fingers.

It was a damned good thing she’d wrung him out so thoroughly, or he’d have gotten worked up all over again. Sighing as he ended the kiss, Steve drew back to smile down at her. The sense of happiness and contentment and satiation that washed back and forth from one end of the link to the other was addicting.

“C’mon, let’s get some sleep,” he said, and ran his thumb over her lips. She caught his hand in hers, leading the way to his bed and refusing to let go even as she slipped beneath the covers.

Steve followed her down, and the moment he was stretched out she tucked herself against his side, hand on his chest and head on his shoulder. He shifted so his arm was beneath her more comfortably, his hand coming up to rest on her waist in turn.

“God, you feel good,” he murmured, and brushed another kiss against the crown of her head. Her spicy scent seemed stronger than usual, maybe enhanced by her arousal.

“I’m not going to want to leave in the morning,” she warned him, already drowsy.

“I know,” he agreed. “I’m not going to want you to go. We’ll work it out.”

Those words were rapidly becoming their motto, or maybe their mantra. ‘We’ll work it out’, because they had no other choice. Not that Steve wanted another choice, at this point.

But it would be damned nice if they could be in bed together _and_ get off, instead of it being an either/or situation.

* * *

It didn’t take long for the positive side effects of the link to become obvious. Steve and Wanda weren’t just working as a team; they were operating as a single unit, able to coordinate flawlessly. They could predict and anticipate each other in ways that let them hopelessly confuse an enemy by switching targets and attack patterns without warning. It was the next level up from the easy teamwork they’d all developed together, and it felt so natural that Steve now found it irritating to have to give verbal commands and receive reports with everyone else.

They quickly discovered that she also had access to a lesser version of Steve’s enhanced tactical ability, the one that let him calculate angles, momentum, and trajectories fast enough to be able to hurl his shield and hit multiple moving targets consecutively. Effectively, she was using his mind to make the calculation, though the full explanation Hill gave for how it was happening was considerably beyond Steve’s comprehension. The relevant part was that the change gave her pinpoint accuracy with her kinetic powers, allowing her to do far more damage with much less wasted effort.

The end result was that working back to back, they were now a nearly unstoppable team. They could not only take on all the other Avengers at once, but anything else anybody wanted to throw at them. It turned into an impromptu betting pool one day, with the Avengers and STRIKE teams attacking in a round robin tag team fashion. Steve and Wanda lost in the end, but it took nearly an hour of steady, concentrated attacks to wear them to the ground.

Better yet, all the effects of the link worked as well even at a considerable distance. It meant the Avengers were now able to field two teams in perfect coordination without needing to break radio silence, something that would give them a huge advantage in certain situations.

As Steve had expected there was some grumbling about potential favouritism. Somewhat to Wanda’s dismay, however, quite the opposite happened. When training others Steve always had to make certain not to push them too hard, and he knew he sometimes forgot where the line for ‘too hard’ was for normal people.

With Vision it didn’t much matter of course, but Sam, Rhodey, and Wanda could be overworked and potentially injured if Steve wasn’t careful. Even with Natasha he had to pay attention, though she was better at recognizing her own physical limitations and putting her foot down. So while he pushed them to do their best, he tended to err on the side of caution as far as stretching their limits was concerned.

Now he could tell _exactly_ where Wanda’s limits were, and he drove her mercilessly right up to them. By the end of each training session she was glaring bloody murder at him, and getting sympathetic slaps on the back from Rhodey and Sam. She was improving rapidly as a result, her strength and stamina increasing noticeably, but that didn’t seem to appease her much.

Then one day Steve caught himself contemplating letting her have a break, for once. Working her hard enough to make the others feel it was fair, but not to the edge of collapsing as he usually did.

“Hey,” he snapped, turning to scowl at Wanda. “You wanna spend a night cleaning the toilets for punishment duty? Cut it out. I’m not giving you any slack, so you can stop poking at me about it.”

Too late he realized he shouldn’t have said it aloud. If he’d simply refused to give in, nobody would have known she’d tried to influence him. He could have chewed her out later, in private. Steve held his breath, afraid the others - especially Natasha - would jump all over it.

“You can’t blame me for trying,” Wanda muttered, giving him the evil eye. That phrase took on a whole new meaning when she was the one doing it, with the hellish red glow in her eyes. Sam was snickering, and Wanda turned her baleful look on him instead. “You know, I could relay _your_ mental state to him, so he could feel confident to work you as hard without breaking you. In fact, maybe I should be doing that for all of you. It’s what would be best for the team, isn’t it?”

The chorus of arguments and denials from Rhodey and Sam was entertaining, to say the least. Natasha had a strange little half-smile curving her lips, and she was looking at Wanda with what Steve thought might be approval.

After the training session was over Natasha cornered him in the lounge the group of them had sort of taken over by accident. Steve wasn’t sure when or how it had become designated the ‘Avengers Break Room’, but it did seem as though one or more of them could be found there any time they were off duty. The rest of the base personnel tended to avoid it, giving them a place to relax properly. Steve knew he wasn’t the only one who felt some pressure to be ‘on for the cameras’, as Natasha put it, when other people were around.

Nobody wanted to know that their heroes could become exhausted and irritable, that they sometimes drank to get tipsy and ate junk food as a guilty pleasure, or that they made awful jokes and snickered like ten year olds at double entendres. It had been the same at Avengers Tower - when it was only them and a select group of trusted others, they could be normal people and do the dumb crap normal people did with their friends. The new team was no different.

Steve had expected he was in for another argument, but to his surprise Natasha only went to the bar fridge and pulled out a vodka cooler. When she held up his favourite brand of beer and raised an eyebrow, he nodded and she tossed the bottle to him. Steve flipped the cap off with his thumb and took a long swallow. He might not notice the effects of alcohol anymore without resorting to the flask of Asgardian mead Thor had left for him, but he still enjoyed the good stuff for its own sake.

“You’re not as upset as I thought you’d be,” he commented, watching warily as she kicked off her shoes and curled up draped sideways over the arm of the couch, her preferred pose for relaxing. “I figured I was in for a lecture about Wanda trying to control me.”

“No, actually, that was beautifully done,” Natasha said, and there was definitely approval in her eyes. “She proved that she _can’t_ influence you, and did it in a way that not only didn’t get the others upset with her for trying, it won her some sympathy. I couldn’t have handled it better myself.”

Blinking, Steve considered her words. “Is that what happened?” he asked, bemused. “So you think she wasn’t really trying, just playacting for the effect?”

“Pretty sure she really tried,” Natasha said, tipping her drink up for a sip. “I started watching her the moment I realized you were easing up for no reason. She wanted to know the answer, herself. Anyway, I take it all back. She’s been good for you.”

“Oh? Here I thought you were sure it was inevitable that she’d take over my brain,” Steve chuckled, settling into a different couch with one arm spread along the back.

Natasha pointed her bottle at him. “See, that right there. That’s what I’m talking about. I think I’ve heard you laugh more in the past four weeks than in the entire four years before. You actually _go_ off duty now, instead of only officially being off. You’re relaxed, you’re having fun... I’ve never seen you so happy. It’s a good look on you.”

“Now you’re trying to make me blush,” Steve accused her, but he could feel the rather sappy smile on his own face. It was true, he was happy. It wasn’t perfect, but nothing ever was.

“When am I not?” Natasha teased him. “The only thing I can’t figure out is why the hell you’re both walking around carrying so much sexual tension you could power the whole base from the sparks between you. I know for a fact she sleeps in your quarters more often than not.”

Of course she would zero in on that. There was no way he was explaining any of the reasons to Natasha. “I’m saving myself for marriage,” he told her in the most prim and pious tone he could summon. He thought he’d gone way over the top, but she choked on her drink and stared at him.

“I can’t tell if you’re joking,” she said, wide-eyed and disbelieving. “I can _always_ tell if you’re joking, but I... _please_ tell me you’re joking?”

Well, that had to be a first. Biting his cheek to fight down a grin, Steve raised an eyebrow at her. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“Have I taught you nothing?” she demanded, and he thought she was legitimately horrified by the idea. “I honestly don’t know if I can continue being friends with you.”

Steve set his drink on the table and stood without thinking about it. A moment later Wanda came in, and he smiled at her. As always, she rolled her eyes at him for standing, but he could feel her pleasure that he cared enough to want to, manners or not.

“I am so, so sorry,” Natasha told Wanda, shaking her head. Steve was pretty sure the apology was sincere. “I feel like I’ve failed you. Hell, I feel like I’ve failed the world.”

“What are you talking about?” Wanda asked, bewildered.

“Mr. Pure and Virtuous over there,” Natasha elaborated. “I thought I’d done a much better job of corrupting him.”

Wanda tipped her head at Steve, and he felt her confusion through the link. He smirked and sent back his self-satisfaction at _finally_ getting the better of Natasha for once, and Wanda’s shoulders shook with silent laughter.

“Okay, it’s actually kind of creepy when you two do that,” Natasha complained, flapping a hand at them. “Especially when he’s all smiling and relaxed. I keep wanting to look for the pod. Shoo. Go cuddle somewhere, if that’s really all you’re willing to do. What is the world coming to?”

Chuckling under his breath, Steve wrapped an arm around Wanda’s waist and led her back into the hall. “What was that all about?” Wanda demanded after the door closed behind them.

“I told her I was saving myself for marriage, and apparently that put our friendship in danger,” Steve said, highly amused. “She couldn’t tell if I was kidding. Usually I’m an open book to her, so that was a nice change.”

Wanda’s answering smile was wry, her amusement underlain by frustration. Steve could feel both pushing at him, connecting with his own answering emotions. It _was_ incredibly frustrating, and he knew he had no one to blame but himself. Well, possibly Dr. Erskine, but considering all the good that had come to Steve from the serum, he felt bad putting any blame on the doctor.

He almost wished he’d been telling Natasha the truth. At least if that was the case, he could choose to break down and give in earlier. Or, he supposed, he could actually marry Wanda and solve the problem that way, but it was _way_ too early in their relationship to be thinking about things like that.

Especially since it wasn’t as if marriage would solve the problem. If only it was that simple.


	6. Chapter 6

Usually Steve was very focused during briefings, especially when strategy was being discussed. He made a particular point of paying close attention in any meeting that involved Nick Fury, because even now the man had a distressing habit of being slippery about his real agenda when he was suggesting a joint operation between the Avengers and the new SHIELD.

Tonight, though, he couldn’t seem to keep his concentration on much of anything for long. He caught himself doodling and it took far too much effort to stop. The urge to fidget wasn’t something he often felt, but it was growing increasingly difficult to sit still.

He assumed it had something to do with Wanda, but he kept their link closed as tightly as he could when he was in meetings. He’d insisted she teach him to do it properly, for the sake of moments exactly like this one. If she truly needed him she could break through the mental shield, but he didn’t sense that she was actively trying to reach him.

It wasn’t that he was keeping secrets, because pretty much everything discussed was going to be passed on to the team anyway, but Steve didn’t think she needed to know exactly how the meetings went down. He didn’t let her listen in on strategizing sessions with Natasha, either. Basically anything where it wasn’t appropriate for her to be physically sitting there, he did his best to block her out of. She’d been good about not prying when he did, respecting the boundaries he needed to set as the leader of the team.

Realizing he was doodling again, Steve growled under his breath and forced his hand to still. Hell, maybe he should give in and drop the pen. It wasn’t like he was successfully taking any notes, anyway. He’d have to get Natasha to do a run-down for him later, and she was going to tease him about needing it. She was side-eyeing him even now, smirking ever so slightly, just enough to let him see it.

Sudden heat jolted through him, the blast of arousal catching Steve completely by surprise. He struggled not to react, but couldn’t stop himself from inhaling sharply and going tense.

“Are you all right, Captain?” Hill asked, blinking at him. Natasha’s smirk widened, and Steve ground his teeth at the sight. She’d obviously figured out at least some of what was going on.

“I’m fine,” Steve assured Hill, determined to ignore both Natasha and whatever the hell Wanda was doing.

That resolution lasted about five seconds, which was when the next wave of aching need swept through him. The plastic pen didn’t snap; it shattered to pieces when Steve’s hand went tight, and ink spilled all over his fist and the table. “Damn it,” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet and dropping the remains. He was frustrated with himself for the lack of control, but also grateful for the excuse. “Sorry, give me a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Projecting aggravation and anger at Wanda as hard as he could, Steve strode out of the boardroom and ducked into the nearest men’s room. He made sure the water was cold when he stuck his ink-covered hand beneath the faucet, but it wasn’t nearly enough to combat the heat building like a rising tide within him.

Breathing hard, he closed his eyes and reluctantly opened the link. She obviously wasn’t paying any attention to what he was sending her through the shield he’d put up. Immediately he was slammed by the vision of what she was doing, though he managed to keep her from pulling him in to ride along with her in her body.

As he’d expected given what he was feeling, she was sprawled out over her bed with one hand on her breast and the other rubbing tiny circles over and around her pearl. She’d clearly been at it a while, because she was already gasping and rocking her hips up into each touch.

“ _Stop_ ,” Steve hissed between clenched teeth. They couldn’t pass actual words through the link unless she turned it into a full-on vision, but he’d found that saying them still helped him get his meaning through to her better. “Damn it, Wanda! Cut it out.”

Finally she seemed to notice his reaction, or realized it was in fact something that was aimed at her. He got a flare of defiance in return, laced with a desperate sense of how close to the edge she was and how badly she wanted it. Growling, Steve clenched his hands on the edge of the counter to the point of pain, and heard the stainless steel groan beneath the pressure. He was going to leave handprints, but it was the only way he could hang on to his self-control.

“Don’t you dare,” he warned, pushing every bit of his irritation and humiliation at her. “I swear to God I’ll come up there and put you over my knee.” That earned him a teasing sense of interest. “ _Not_ in a way you’ll enjoy, I guarantee it.”

The cry she made when she reluctantly pulled her hands away from her body wasn’t something he could physically hear, but it seemed to echo in his mind anyway. Belatedly, it occurred to Steve that maybe stopping her was in fact a stupid idea, since now she was going to be aching with frustration and need in the back of his mind. If she’d finished, she’d at least have calmed down faster and allowed him to do the same.

Then again, even though she’d been close, it might have taken her several minutes to get the rest of the way there. Steve took a deep breath, and concentrated hard on the memory of freezing in the ice. As much as he hated that moment in his life, it was effective in helping him get rid of unwanted arousal.

Gently she took the memory from him and shifted it, giving him the snowdrift by the cabin instead. Still freezing, but without the overtones of agony as the ice slowly closed him in and he ‘died’. Not quite as effective, but certainly more welcome.

“Thank you,” he breathed out, when he was finally under control again. He meant it as thanks both for stopping in the first place, and for helping him to calm himself. What he got in return was resentment and an emotion he could only describe as ‘rudeness’. He’d have to make it up to her later, but right now he’d already taken far too long to justify cleaning up a simple ink spill.

Holding the image of the snow in his mind allowed him to return to the conference room without blushing himself to death. “Sorry ‘bout that,” he apologized, and winced mentally as he heard the rough edge to his words. The Brooklyn was creeping in, and there was no way Natasha wasn’t going to jump all over it.

Sure enough her eyes were sparkling as she turned to him, and Steve pointed a warning finger at her. “Don’t. Start,” he snapped, and didn’t even try to keep his accent out of it.

Raising her hands in a gesture of mute surrender, she leaned back in her chair and smirked instead, proving she didn’t need words to make fun of him anyway.

The meeting ended fairly quickly after that, and Steve was mortifyingly aware that it was largely because he still couldn’t keep his attention focused on anything. He couldn’t seem to get his mental shield back in place now that he’d dropped it, too aware of the snapping sparks of arousal floating between them. The moment Fury signed off, Steve beat a hasty retreat out of the boardroom in the – probably futile, especially in Natasha’s case – hope of preventing the two women from noticing the state he was in.

He was going to be in for it tomorrow. Hill could be almost as bad as Natasha, though she at least never teased him if anyone but the other Avengers were present. Worse, they were probably sitting in there right now comparing notes.

Wanda’s door slid open as he neared it - presumably she’d felt him approaching. She was waiting for him right outside her bedroom, arms folded across her chest in a way that accentuated the soft slope of her breasts. He’d been half afraid she’d remain naked, but she’d thrown on a nightshirt as a sop to his sense of modesty.

He didn’t need the link to tell Wanda was furious. Her stance was aggressive, her chin up and eyes flaring red, tiny wisps of glowing power making her hair float around her shoulders. “So now only you are allowed to initiate things?” she demanded before he could get a word out. “You’ve never objected before!”

“I’ve never been in a meeting with Romanoff, Hill, and Fury before,” Steve countered, blushing all over again at the humiliation of it. He projected that at her forcefully, and her eyes went wide.

“It’s one in the morning,” she protested. She clearly wanted to disbelieve him, but his intense embarrassment was difficult to deny.

“Not where Fury is,” Steve said. “It was the only time we could organize the video conference.”

“Oh my God, I am _so_ sorry,” she whispered, unfolding her arms to cover her mouth with both hands. He could feel her genuine shock and remorse.

As her anger ebbed, so did the worst of Steve’s mortification. The frustration and arousal remained for both of them, however, and it was growing harder to ignore. He wanted so badly to reach out to her, gather her close and kiss the apology off her lips, before carrying her into the bedroom to finish what she’d started.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen and he really needed to concentrate on something _else_ before he gave in to temptation. “We’re gonna have to work out a set of signals, I guess. Check in to make sure it’s okay before we, you know, start.” He gave her a wry look. “For future reference, if I’m locked down, it’s probably a good sign I’m in the middle of something and not alone.”

Wanda still had her hands over her mouth, but her shoulders started to shake and a giggle bubbled up. He could feel the remorse turning to amusement, and he scowled at her. “It’s not funny,” he insisted, pride stung.

“It is, a little,” she said, trying and failing to stifle the giggles.

“You’re not the one who’s gonna have to live with Natasha teasing you about it for the rest of your life,” he complained, but he moved forward and cupped her cheek in one hand.

As always the contact strengthened the bond, and Steve swallowed hard as he felt the electric buzz of arousal and need humming through her. Wanda closed her eyes and tipped her head, nuzzling into his hand. “You could stay,” she suggested. “Since you’re here already.”

His groin tightened, and Steve groaned. “You know that ain’t gonna happen,” he replied, but he couldn’t stop himself from stepping closer.

“Just because we can’t touch doesn’t mean we can’t be in the same room,” she pointed out, her hand coming up to cover his. She stretched in a way that rubbed her breasts against his chest, and Steve’s breath caught in his throat.

“There’s no way I could sit there and watch you and _not_ end up with my hands on you,” he said, his voice strangled with desire.

“Flatterer,” Wanda accused him with a husky laugh that went straight to his dick. “What happened to that famous stubborn willpower of yours?”

“Even I have limits,” he protested, shifting his hand so he could brush his thumb over her lips. She turned her head and closed her mouth around the digit, tongue flicking over the sensitive tip, and suddenly there wasn’t enough air in the room to breathe. Shivering, Steve tried very hard to remember exactly why it would be a bad idea to scoop her up and carry her into the bedroom.

Releasing his thumb with a soft pop that made his dick jump, Wanda stepped back and pulled away. She tossed her hair back over her shoulder as if she was annoyed, but the sly grin on her lips and the wicked amusement he could sense from her said otherwise.

“Then I suggest you find somewhere private, quickly,” she warned him. “Because unless you have another meeting to be at, this is your sixty second warning.”

Reaching down, she caught the hem of her nightshirt and pulled it up over her head in one smooth motion, baring her lithe body for his appreciation. And God, did Steve appreciate the sight. When she tossed the shirt in his direction he caught it automatically, hardly even registering the motion as he stared at her.

One more step back and she was out of sight, but the soft creak of the mattress a moment later told him where she was. Steve’s mouth was dry to the point that he couldn’t swallow, and his dick was throbbing so hard with need it felt like his heart must have decided to chase after the blood supply.

Was she right? Was his willpower strong enough to keep him from closing the distance if he stayed to watch? It wasn’t like he went charging off to her every time he rode along with her in her mind. Would it really be any different? Steve wanted to stay so badly he could taste it.

He’d taken the first step towards the bedroom when she called out, “Thirty seconds.” The teasing warning made his heart jump and muscles go tense… and a cracking noise presaged a sharp pain in his left hand.

Grimacing, Steve looked down, already knowing what he would see. The datapad with the briefing info Fury had sent was ruined, the screen a maze of cracks from the pressure he’d exerted on it without realizing what he was doing.

Well, that answered that question. Swearing under his breath, Steve turned and strode out of her quarters, heading for his own as fast as he could go without running. His control was _not_ good enough to take the risk of staying. It would be far too easy to convince himself that one touch couldn’t hurt, as long as he was careful, and from there it was a slippery slope to a very painful ending.

He wasn’t sure if he actually managed to cross the distance quickly enough, or if Wanda took pity on him and waited until he was out of the public hallway. Either way, the instant his door closed behind him she threw the link open so wide he stumbled, losing track of what information was coming from his body and what was coming from hers.

Especially since what was coming from hers was _so_ much more interesting to focus on. Wanda was on her knees on the bed with her cheek on the pillow and ass in the air, legs spread wide for better access and both hands downtown. The fingers of one hand teased lightly at her pearl, which was the sensation that had brought Steve literally to his knees, and with her other hand she traced ever-deeper circles around her opening.

Shuddering, he leaned back against the door, gasping for air. Somehow he gathered enough awareness and concentration to fumble at his belt buckle, though the coordination necessary to actually get it undone seemed to be beyond him. With a growl of frustration he snapped the damned belt and pulled it free of the loops, then hastily undid his fly.

The release of pressure on his aching dick made Steve hiss in relief, and when he wrapped his hand around the shaft it helped anchor him in his own body. Not that he minded being in hers when she was doing _that_ , but it was kind of nice to actually experience it when he shot the works, instead of returning to the aftermath.

Biting his lip, Steve closed his eyes and stroked himself with a firm grip, moving his hand in time with her fingers. It was an effort to hold back, but she was still teasing herself with light, slow touches and he didn’t want to get off ahead of her. She could come more than once, and sometimes she could even drag him into getting off a second time along with her. Not always, though, so he didn’t want to rush it.

“Steve,” she whispered into his ear, and licked at the upper curve. Steve jerked back in surprise, his head impacting the door hard enough to hurt even for him, and stared at her.

“How the hell did you get in here?” he exclaimed, panicked.

She was too close, sitting right in front of him with her knees on either side of his, leaving her legs spread in a tantalizing display. Steve couldn’t stop his gaze from dropping, all the breath leaving him in a shuddering gasp as he saw the wetness glistening on her dark curls.

Steve groaned as she slid her hand down to stroke herself, unashamed that he was watching. “You can’t hurt me like this,” Wanda told him, smirking. “Go ahead. Touch me.”

“I could _kill_ you by accident,” he replied, flinching back when she traced her other hand over his jaw. “Are you out of your mind? Or just feeling suicidal?”

“You can’t hurt me,” she repeated, laughing. “Turn your brain back on. I’m not really there, how could I be?”

Blinking, Steve looked around and confirmed what he already knew – he was kneeling in his front hall with his back against the door, and it definitely hadn’t opened. Unless she’d suddenly developed the ability to teleport, there was no physical way she could be in here with him. “This is a vision?”

She held up her hand, and he took it gingerly in one of his own. It seemed real, absolutely real; he could feel the heat of her body, the texture of her skin, he could even smell her if he inhaled deeply. But when he tightened his grip experimentally, she didn’t flinch and he felt not even a spark of pain from her no matter how hard he squeezed.

“Son of a gun,” he breathed out, lifting his eyes to meet hers in shock and wonder. “Why the hell didn’t we do this before? Aren’t you gonna lose concentration, you know, at the good part?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve never done this, I only thought of it now. I never needed to with… with Pietro.” She faltered for a moment at the reminder, but rallied quickly with a smile. “It’s worth a try, don’t you think?”

“Oh, hell yes,” Steve exclaimed, and reached for her eagerly. She was no less enthusiastic, letting him catch her by the waist and pull her right onto his lap so they could kiss properly. Her breasts rubbed against him, enticing softness contrasting with the stiff points of her nipples, and her ass ground down on his dick in a way that made him moan into her mouth.

They’d done things like this a few times before, though she’d never been naked and he usually had his hands wrapped around something solid like the bed frame. Sometimes he could get away with touching her, if he concentrated hard on what she was feeling so he’d know the instant he started to hurt her, but it meant losing track of what _his_ body was doing. That made it difficult to accomplish anything that required any level of skill or coordination.

Wanda was positive that if they could gradually get him used to the increase in his strength caused by arousal, he would learn to control it. Steve wasn’t convinced, but he was more than willing to enjoy the make-out sessions in the attempt.

And this time, he didn’t need to keep his hands carefully away from her. Sliding his grip down to cup her ass, he pulled her tighter against him, lifting her so he didn’t have to bend as far as he usually did to trail his mouth down over her throat. She tasted of the same spice as her scent mixed with a faint hint of salt from her sweat, and it was something he’d grown addicted to.

Better yet, there was no shirt collar to prevent him from continuing down. He kept going, lapping and nipping at the soft skin, and Wanda shivered and went tense as he approached her breasts. It occurred to Steve to wonder if she’d taste the same all the way down, so to speak, and he groaned at the thought. He’d gotten a taste of her juices second hand when she licked her fingers for him, but experiencing it himself would be far more intense.

But when he went to close his mouth over her nipple, suddenly Wanda was gone and Steve was holding nothing but air. Gasping and bereft, he reached out to her and saw her lying in her bed. She was panting as well, frustrated and bewildered. A moment later she was back in his lap, vision re-established.

Despite the aggravation of the sudden stop, Steve’s mouth twitched in a smile as he looked at her. “Lost your concentration after all?”

“I think perhaps it’s because there’s no connection to what I’m doing to myself,” Wanda sighed. Then she gave him a sinful smile, and took his hand in hers. “Of course, there’s a simple solution for that. You’ll have to do the same thing I’m doing.”

His breath catching, Steve willingly let her guide his hand downwards. From being inside her head so many times as she did this, he knew what to expect. His fingers encountered soft, wet heat and silky folds of flesh, and she cried out and rocked into his touch as he slid them deeper.

Knowing that she was doing the same thing to herself down the hall was powerfully erotic, even as Steve wished it could be his hand on her for real. “You’ll have to follow what I do, if you want this to work,” he reminded her, and flexed his hand to explore the shape of her.

When his thumb brushed over her pearl, Wanda shuddered and leaned back so far he was afraid she’d fall over. Catching her between the shoulders with his free hand, Steve kissed her again. He wasn’t sure why they could do that but not have his mouth on her breasts, but as long as it kept working he really didn’t care.

Carefully he slid a finger inside her, breathing hard as her tight flesh closed around him. God, he could imagine how that would feel around his dick, and it would be absolute Heaven. Would they be able to do that, or would that be too far outside what her real body was experiencing? Maybe if she put something inside her besides her fingers - they made objects for exactly that purpose, and he’d bet every cent he had that she could buy one in five minutes or less on the internet.

Shoving the thoughts to the back of his mind for later, Steve concentrated on what he could do to her right now. He worked his finger in and out, curling it up to try to locate the spot she liked so much. It wasn’t difficult to tell when he’d found it, not when the jolt of pleasure that went through her was so strong he could feel it as well.

Adding a second finger made Wanda cry out and writhe in his arms, pushing her hips against him in desperate, pleading motions. It was awkward, but Steve managed to twist his hand so his thumb was on her pearl again, and his reward was another jolt of pleasure so strong his dick jumped in response.

Breaking the kiss, he panted for air against her throat. Wanda had her hands clenched tight in his hair, tugging sharply every time he rubbed his thumb over the nub of flesh or flexed his fingers inside her. The sounds she was making were like nothing he’d ever heard before, soft mewls of heated desire scaling rapidly up to something closer to outright screams.

And then she did scream, high and loud as she came, clenching so tight around his fingers he could feel the muscles contracting. He gentled his touch the way she always did, stroking her lightly through the orgasm to keep it going as long as he could. At last she sagged against him, collapsing into his lap as if every bone had been removed from her body, limp and sated.

Curious, Steve lifted his hand to his mouth, but the thick liquid didn’t taste like much and smelled like nothing at all. He couldn’t bring himself to be disappointed, though. Not when it had finally been his hand getting her off instead of her own.

Well, kind of. As close as he was going to get, anyway. It was certainly better than lying there and feeling her do it instead.

Stirring, Wanda lifted her head from where she was leaning against his shoulder and gave him a lazy smile. “That seems to have worked well enough,” she purred, raking her nails along his scalp as she ran her hands through his hair. Steve shuddered and tipped his head into the touch, encouraging her.

“Definitely a step forward,” he agreed, and his voice was hoarse with need. His dick was still throbbing, and while having her soft ass grinding into his lap was good, he was positive it could get a lot better.

“Your turn, I think,” Wanda echoed his thoughts, and ran her hands down over his chest. “Next time, take your clothes off, first.”

“Hey, I wasn’t the one who gave me sixty seconds to find someplace private before you started,” Steve objected, watching with breathless anticipation as she traced over his abdomen and on towards his dick. She closed her hand around him, and it felt...

Well, it felt pretty much like every time he’d ever done it himself. Steve bit his lip, disappointed. From the way Bucky had talked about it after coming back from his dates, Steve had expected it to be different.

It was good, though. Damn, it was good. If he closed his eyes and concentrated Steve could tell it _was_ really his own hand on his dick, and maybe that was why it didn’t feel much different. But he could do that any time, so he opened his eyes again and watched hungrily as she stroked him, teasing the foreskin back and running her fingertips along the crown.

Then Wanda shifted her hips back, giving herself room to bend down. She went slowly, drawing it out, licking her lips to draw Steve’s attention to her mouth. Like his eyes weren’t fixed on her already. He held his breath, chest tight, and the moment her lips made contact... she was gone.

Shouting with agonized frustration, Steve thrust up into his own hand, bereft once more. Damn it, they should have expected that, if he wasn’t able to put his mouth on her breasts.

When she came back she had her hand on his dick, but she stilled her motions with a frown. “When I do this, it doesn’t feel any different to you than your own touch?” she asked, and he could sense her ghosting through his mind, picking through the sensations.

“No. Did it to you?” Steve asked, struggling to control his breathing.

“Yes. I know what’s going wrong,” Wanda sighed. “You remember how you broke free of the dream I gave you?”

“What, because Peggy didn’t smell right?” Steve wasn’t sure what the hell that had to do with anything, or why they needed to talk about it right _now_ when he was aching with the need for release.

“She didn’t have the right scent because you didn’t _know_ what she smelled like, off the battlefield,” Wanda reminded him. “I can’t make you experience something you have no reference for.”

Understanding came at last, and Steve groaned. “I don’t know what it’s like to put my mouth on you, or have yours on me. That’s why we can kiss but not anything else.”

“And why this...” she ran her hand down his length and back up again, making him gasp as she swirled her thumb over the top. “This feels the same to you as when you do it yourself. Your mind is filling in the gaps as best it can. I feel you properly because I’ve been touched by a man before, even if not by you.”

“I don’t know what it feels like to have my fingers inside you...” Steve trailed off with a sigh, and answered his own objection. “But I do know what it feels like to you when you do it. That’s why I can’t smell anything, or really taste it. Your senses aren’t as strong as mine.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, crestfallen. “I thought it would work.”

“Hey, it _did_ work,” Steve reminded her, drawing her in for a deep kiss. This, his mind apparently had no trouble extrapolating from experience. The difference between kissing her in the vision and kissing her in real life was that he didn’t have to hold back, didn’t have to concentrate on not being too hard or too forceful. He could nip and lick and bite as much as he wanted, and didn’t have to worry about where he was holding her or how tight.

When they parted again they were both breathing hard, and he was smirking. “Trust me, it’s worth it for the chance to be able to touch you, and kiss you properly.”

“Well.” She was smiling again, and leaned in close to breathe the next words out against his mouth. “If I can’t give you everything, I can at least give you more than you get alone.” She squeezed her fingers around his dick as she kissed him, her tongue pushing aggressively against his. Her other hand fisted in his hair again, pulling his head back to let her get a better angle for the kiss.

She stroked him fast and hard, the way she knew he liked it, not teasing any longer. Steve clung to her and kissed her back fiercely as she brought him to the edge and pushed him over. It _was_ better, to have her against him and be able to kiss her as he came.

By the time he was able to focus again, Wanda had pulled back to the position she’d started in, kneeling right in front of him. Steve ran his eyes over her again, appreciating the luscious shapes of her body. “I’ve got to get you to pose for me, one of these days,” he said wistfully.

“For your drawings?” She laughed in delight. “I’d like that, I think. Right now, you are the one who is mostly dressed, so tonight you can come to me. I want you next to me.”

“Sure. Just as soon as my bones grow back,” Steve huffed, struggling to pull himself up from where he was slumped against the door. His limbs were shaky, his whole body wrung out like a mop. That was usually how he felt after she got done messing with his head for sex, but he didn’t mind. God, no. It was the best thing he’d ever experienced, and she kept finding ways to make it better.

Wanda was gone when he looked up, but he could feel her longing clearly through the link. Quickly he started straightening his clothes, tucking himself back into his pants and zipping up again. When he judged he was presentable enough for a short trip down an empty hall, he turned and slipped out of his quarters...

...only to run straight into Natasha. She gave him a brief once-over and then glanced at Wanda’s door, where the green-lit panel clearly indicated the woman was inside. Turning back to him, Natasha raised an eyebrow in a disbelieving look. “Okay, why are you only going over there _now_ , and why do you look like you had a quickie _first_?”

Blushing so hotly he could feel it all the way to his ears, Steve shook his head. “Not seeing where that’s any of your business,” he retorted. A thought occurred to him, and he bit down on a smile. “Besides, you already know why. Even I don’t have enough self-control to just hold her if I’m worked up to start with.”

With an agonized expression, Natasha rubbed at her temple like he’d given her a headache. “You know, you might have fewer awkward meetings if you two give in and get it out of your systems,” she suggested, almost begging him.

“Why does it bother you so much, anyway?” Steve asked, fascinated by her response.

“It’s a criminal waste, that’s why,” Natasha sighed, her gaze flicking down and up his body once more, with blatant appreciation this time. “You’re so damn considerate you’d probably be _good_ at sex, with some practice. Do you have any idea how rare that really is? There’s got to be a law somewhere against you refusing to share your talents.”

“Good luck finding that one on the books,” Steve told her, laughing. A sharp spike of impatience struck him from Wanda, and he sent back an image of Natasha’s pained, pleading look. The impatience didn’t ease, but she did add amusement as well. “Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got somewhere to be.”

“I’m going to corrupt you sooner or later,” Natasha called after him. “Or better yet, conspire with Wanda to help her do it.”

“Maybe I need to start looking for people to set _you_ up with, keep you from obsessing over my love life so much,” Steve called back.

“You owe it to the women of the world,” she insisted. “Suck it up and do your duty, Rogers!”

“Good night, Natasha,” Steve said firmly, stepping inside Wanda’s quarters. Turning his head as the door slid closed, he caught a glimpse of her throwing her hands up in exasperation and defeat, and the sight made him chuckle.

Getting the best of Natasha _and_ getting Wanda off with his own hand, or the next thing to it? Despite the lousy start, Steve reflected smugly, tonight was turning out to be a pretty damned good night.


	7. Chapter 7

Consciousness pulled at Steve with ever-increasing force, but he clung to sleep with all his will. The dream he was having was far too good to let go of any sooner than he absolutely had to. Wanda’s hand was wrapped around him, stroking slowly, winding the tension inside him like turning the key in a clockwork. Unlike in the shared visions that were as close as they could come to real sex, it _did_ feel different from his own hand. Soft and delicate, her smaller fingers flicking over his length, playing with the foreskin.

And then there was something new, something he’d never felt before, warm and wet and oh God, what was she...

With a strangled gasp Steve jerked awake. Or rather, tried to. The awake part he managed, but his body didn’t seem to want to respond to his commands. That was bad, really bad, because Wanda had apparently _lost her mind_ and decided to wake him up with a French bath. She had her lips wrapped around the head of his dick, her hand stroking along his shaft.

It was the most amazing thing Steve had ever experienced in his life, but he could feel adrenalin racing through his system, and the added panic now that he was awake wasn’t helping any. Keeping his hands off her wasn’t going to be enough - if he lost control and thrust his hips up, he’d probably break her face.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded, scared out of his mind. As worked up as he already was, he didn’t dare try to push her away for fear of hurting her badly.

Her shock reached him clearly through the link, joined a moment later by amusement as Wanda stopped and lifted her head to stare at him, wide-eyed. “I’ve never heard you even _think_ that word.”

It took him a second to figure out she was talking about the obscenity. “I save it for special occasions,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “Such as when my girl has apparently decided to court suicide by sex!”

Rolling her eyes, she tossed her hair back in that way she had when she was annoyed with him or thought he was being silly. “You can’t hurt me.” A sly smile played over her lips, and she leaned down to flick her tongue over his slit, lapping up the fluid already leaking there.

Heart pounding, Steve tried to push himself away - and once again failed to move. Belatedly he noticed the unusual red tinge to the morning sunlight, and realized she was holding him immobile with her powers. “What the hell?”

“I’m tired of things being so one-sided,” she declared, and he shuddered as her lips brushed against him with the words. “I want you to know how good this can be. So I’m going to suck you off, and then I’m going to come up there and ride your face. I doubt you’ll manage to hurt me with your mouth, as long as you don’t decide to bite.”

Her blunt words painted a vivid image, and Steve groaned as his body let him know in no uncertain terms that he wanted her to fulfill those promises. The struggle for his mind to win over his dick was more difficult than any other time in his life, but Steve wasn’t one to surrender a battle. “Let me go, Wanda.”

“What? No!” she protested, lifting her head again to glare at him. “Stop worrying and let me do this. It will be all right.”

“Let go,” he insisted, but she ignored him and returned to trying to drive him out of his mind. 

Closing his eyes to concentrate proved to be a mistake. Removing one of his senses only made what she was doing all the more intense. Hastily Steve opened them again and stared hard at the ceiling to focus, instead. Gathering up all of his frustration and fear and anger, he turned the emotions into a weapon and thrust them through the link to break Wanda’s concentration.

With a gasp she lost control, and he grabbed her by the waist and rolled them both over to put him on top, before she could recover. He was careful to handle her like she was made of spun glass, uncertain how much his strength had increased from the excitement of what she’d been doing.

Once he was pinning her, there was no point in her freezing him again. Wanda’s expression could only be described as a pout, and her primary emotion was most definitely sulking. She was put out and exasperated that he was denying her. Not exactly surprising.

“Why won’t you let me?” she exclaimed.

“I might have, if you’d asked first,” he told her. It was incredibly difficult to ignore the way the position was pressing their nude bodies together, though he’d managed to arrange it so that his hips were below hers, not grinding him into her core.

“That’s _not_ something you can spring on me,” he continued, glaring at her. “You’ve gotten way too complacent about doing that, Wanda. You know how I feel about you trying to manipulate me. Surprising me by initiating a vision like you did the first time was bad enough. I only let it slide because there was no chance that something could have gone wrong and ended up with you getting hurt.”

She was trying to block his anger at her conniving, but he shoved it through to her anyway. Finally Wanda sighed and gave in. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it that way. It was only that I knew you would be stubborn and refuse to consider it.”

Letting up on the pressure he was exerting on both her mind and her body, Steve sat back on his heels to look down at her. “So convince me, don’t control me. What if you get distracted and lose concentration?”

“I worried about that, at first,” she admitted. “It’s why I haven’t tried this before. But I’ve never lost control of the shared visions, not once, and my kinetic power only grows stronger. I know I can do this.”

Considering that, Steve had to admit she had a point. And God, it wasn’t as though he didn’t _want_ to find out what it felt like. They only needed to risk it _once_. With the memory of the sensations imprinted in his mind for her powers to tease out, they’d be able to repeat it as many times as they liked in the shared dreams, with no danger to her.

Swallowing, he nodded. “All right, we’ll try it. One more thing, though. If I tell you to let go, you _let go_. Or if I tell you to stop anything else, for that matter. No argument, no hesitation. I need to be able to trust that you’ll do that or this isn’t going to work.” The fact that he’d proven he could break Wanda’s concentration and force his way free was irrelevant. He didn’t want to have to worry that he would need to.

Subdued, she nodded. “I promise. I would never intentionally break your trust.”

“I know.” Now that he’d agreed and they’d gotten his major objection out of the way, Steve found he was suddenly nervous. He’d accepted the idea that they would never be able to do any of this, never get farther than they already had. Now that the possibility had been dangled in front of him, he wanted it _so badly_ his whole body ached with need.

Or maybe that was partly her desire leaking over to him, because she was just as eager for more. 

Settling back onto the bed in the same position he’d been in before, Steve lifted his hands and wrapped them around the reinforced metal bed frame. He’d had it custom made after he’d torn a hollow brass bar off the old one during one of their makeout sessions, and it was more than strong enough for him to hold on to. “Just in case,” he told her, when she looked at him curiously.

Nodding her understanding, Wanda shifted to slide between his legs again. With a flare of red light her power crept over him, locking his muscles and holding him firmly in place. Steve strained against it experimentally, but she had him completely secure.

This time she started with a kiss, then worked her way slowly down over his chest, building the anticipation. His erection had flagged, lost in his anger and upset, but the feel of her warm body against him brought his dick rapidly to attention once more. By the time she reached his abs he was panting, and he cried out when she sealed her lips around the head of his dick and sucked. 

Steve felt like she was scrambling his brain, one flick of her tongue at a time. He couldn’t think past the all-consuming awareness of the heat of her mouth, the wet brush of her lips, the gentle pressure of her tongue. It had felt good before, but it was even better without the accompanying panic and fear.

Not being able to move at all created a bizarre sense of simultaneous restriction and freedom. His hips kept trying to buck up into the touch, but Wanda held him still with no apparent effort. It meant he didn’t have to worry about holding back or doing his part, he could relax into the sensations and let his body react however it wanted to.

He could sense her presence in his mind, feeling his reactions so she could find the best ways to touch him and wring the most pleasure out of him. The genuine enjoyment she took from the act spilled over to him as well, ramping up the effect of the physical stimulation. 

In minutes Steve was moaning a string of incoherent pleas, fighting desperately not to come because he wanted to bask in this for every second he possibly could, but it was a battle he would inevitably lose. Just as he reached the peak she took as much of him into her mouth as she could, and that was the end of his self control. With a shout he emptied himself inside her, shuddering as she swallowed the load and then lapped eagerly at his slit for every last drop.

Dizzy with pleasure, Steve went limp against her hold on him. As usual she’d completely blown him away, leaving him spent and gasping. “You’re incredible,” he said as she sat up and licked her lips with a smirk. “You were right, that was _nothing_ like anything I could imagine.”

“Good,” she fairly purred, crawling up the bed to sit on his chest. “I enjoy doing that. I was tired of not being able to, and of you getting no more from me than you could from yourself.”

From this distance Steve could smell her, the delicious spicy scent mixed with the musk of arousal, and he could see the wetness on her neatly trimmed curls. “My turn?” he asked, breathless with anticipation. He knew what it felt like to her to have someone’s mouth on her from the dreams she still sometimes had about Pietro, but he wanted to know what it would feel like to _him_.

Grinning, Wanda shifted until her legs were tucked beneath his arms, sitting with her knees on either side of his head, gripping the headboard as well for balance as she rose up to position herself over his face.

To his delight, Wanda tasted every bit as good downtown as he’d imagined. She was already wet, dripping with arousal, suggesting she’d meant it when she said she found pleasure in sucking him. He licked at her folds, catching the thick liquid on his tongue and savouring it. She tasted sweet, with a hint of salt, and he pushed deeper to get more.

Sometimes after a date Bucky had shared the details of what he’d done with the dame, but he’d talked about going under the house like it was just something you had to do to get her in the mood. Steve had even heard guys in the war complain about it, the taste or the smell or the feel of the girl putting them off. Though to be fair, he’d heard quite a few describe the act with longing, too.

He quickly discovered that he not only didn’t mind pearl-diving, he Goddamn revelled in it. Wanda was incredibly responsive, moaning with each sweep of his tongue and trembling as she fought the urge to grind down onto his face. Steve didn’t think he’d object if she did, though he supposed it might make breathing difficult.

Tracing around her opening made her whine with need, and when he pushed his tongue as far inside as he could she shuddered against him. Drawing back, he licked his way up until he found the place that made her gasp and push against his tongue.

The sensation was incredible, far better than fingers brushing against it. Steve wanted to sink into that feeling, but if he did he’d lose track of what he was doing. Instead he let himself be aware of her reactions just enough to guide him, and did his best to find out how loud he could make her scream when she came.

Rolling his tongue against her was good, but drawing little circles around her was better. He flicked harder against the nub at irregular intervals, and she gasped each time he did it. Wanda kept trying to shift her hips to force him to stay centered, but although Steve knew it would feel amazing in the short term if he did, he wanted to draw this out as long as he could.

Finally she gave up and let him do what he wanted. Steve varied his pace to see what worked best - sometimes slow and pressing hard, sometimes light and fast little flicks. As far as he could tell damn near everything was good, though Wanda started cursing at him in Sokovian every time he changed it up. He chuckled against her, which made her cry out.

Every touch made the empty feeling within her grow stronger, until even Steve was moaning with it. She wanted, _needed_ something inside her; his fingers, his dick, anything to fill the hollow ache. Steve tried pushing his tongue inside again, but that only left her frustrated with the lack of stimulation above, and anyway he couldn’t reach far enough to get to that spot inside her.

Nearly as desperate as she was, Steve projected an image at her - of her riding him, thighs flexing as she lowered herself onto his dick. He was hard again, the eroticism of the act more than sufficient to overcome the satiation of his previous release. Surely it would be safe enough; he hadn’t hurt her when she’d had her mouth on him. 

As long as she didn’t get distracted and lose control.

Heat raced through her body in response to his suggestion. Breathless, she pulled away from him, though they both moaned at the sudden stop. “Can we?” he asked eagerly. “I mean, I don’t have any rubbers.” He’d thrown them out after that last disastrous date, irritated by the reminder every time he stumbled across the box among his things.

To his surprise the question provoked a surge of exasperated amusement from Wanda. “Natasha ambushed me soon after we got back from the cabin and insisted I go to the base doctor for… extra precautions. She seemed convinced a condom might not be enough, with you.” Steve blushed, and Wanda smirked at him. “This was of course before you told her about your vow of chastity.”

His embarrassment was tempered by relief that she obviously hadn’t told Natasha the truth about their relationship, or why Steve was really so reluctant to date. Not that he would have expected her to, not when she was the one who’d identified it as something private, not for sharing. 

Even better was the confirmation that they were safe to try, if they wanted to. God, Steve really wanted to. “Are you sure you can handle this?” he demanded, willing her to feel how nervous, worried, and outright terrified he was of the prospect, along with his desire. “ _Really_ damned sure, Wanda? You know I’ll never forgive myself if you get hurt.”

“I can do it,” she replied, desperate and determined in equal measures. “ _Please_ , Steve. At least let me try.” She rocked her hips against him where she was perched on his chest, and he could feel her wet heat gliding over his skin. 

“Yeah, okay,” he rasped out, throat going dry at the feel of her. Turning his head, he kissed the inside of her knee, the only part he could reach. His hands clenched tight on the metal, but he was still otherwise unable to move.

Scrambling up, Wanda slid back and repositioned herself so her knees were beside his hips, hands braced on his chest. Slowly she lowered herself down, both of them holding their breath in anxious anticipation until the moment she made contact. Steve gasped as she rubbed over his length with her slick flesh, not letting him penetrate yet but just teasing him with the feel of her.

“Oh _God_ , do that again,” he pleaded, his whole body trembling with the desire to thrust up into her. Wanda obliged, grinding harder against him this time, and he felt the flare of pleasure within her as the head of his dick nudged her pearl. 

When she slid herself over him a third time, he could feel the sharp ache within her at having him _so close_ to where she really wanted him to be. A tiny adjustment of her hips, and suddenly the tip of him was pressing against her opening, the barest fraction of in inch inside.

“May I…?” she begged, and the effort it was taking to restrain herself carried clearly through the bond.

“Fuck, yes,” Steve gasped, and she laughed at the reappearance of the obscenity.

“I suppose this counts as a special occasion, too,” she murmured, and let him sink further inside her.

Steve’s eyes rolled up, and he wasn’t sure if he was groaning or if it was the metal frame. She felt… God, she felt… there were _no words_ in any language that could possibly describe the sensation of her squeezing around him, one torturous inch at a time. Soft and wet and smooth and hot and silky and tight… all of those together didn’t even come close. 

And that was without even accounting for how _Wanda_ felt, the deep satisfaction as the ache within her eased at last, his dick stretching her passage and making her aware of every increment further he moved within her. 

When he was all the way inside she paused, panting for air, letting them both absorb the sensations and try to adjust. The sharp taste of copper flooded Steve’s mouth and he realized he’d bitten his cheek hard enough to pierce the skin, struggling to not come then and there. There was no way in hell he was letting this end yet.

Not until he had a chance to find out what it felt like around his dick instead of his fingers when Wanda got off.

The internal pressure was too great to allow her to stay still for long. Her first motions were shallow, her hips rising and falling only an inch or two, but even that was enough to make Steve moan. Every time she rose she lifted further, slammed down harder, and every time it felt better to both of them. 

It didn’t take long before she was pounding against him, making just as much noise as he was. If Steve had thought it was mind-blowing when her mouth was around him, that was nothing to how good it felt to have her moving over him like this. The urge to thrust was powerful, but there was nothing he could do except let her have her way with him.

Then Wanda dropped her hand to touch herself, and he learned what mind-blowing _really_ meant. 

At that point Steve completely lost track of individual sensations, or even whose body was feeling what. It was all just a jumble of overwhelming ecstasy, pleasure shooting through every nerve in both their bodies, echoing back and forth between them to create a feedback loop like nothing that should exist outside of Heaven itself.

Somehow he held on until he felt her body start to squeeze around him, because that was the part he most wanted to experience. Once she started they were both lost, the longest and best orgasm of Steve’s entire life.

His hands slipped on the frame, and the tiny part of his mind that was still rational panicked as he realized it meant she’d released him exactly as he’d feared she would. He yanked hard on the metal, using the pull to anchor himself, and by some miracle managed to keep his hips still as they rode out the waves of ecstasy.

Only when Wanda collapsed against him, boneless and limp, did Steve finally let go of the frame. As it turned out, he was just as wrung out and unable to move as Wanda, so it didn’t really matter that much that she wasn’t holding him down any more. Still, he was exquisitely careful as he slid his trembling arms down to wrap around her, one hand buried in her hair and the other spread across her back.

“That was amazing,” Steve said, his voice rough with satiation and contentment. 

“I told you we could do it,” Wanda said, and _she_ sounded gleeful.

“Yeah, except you let me go right at the end,” Steve told her. Frowning, she lifted her head to look at him... and her gaze caught on something just past him, her eyes going round with shock and a touch of horror. 

Steve sighed, her expression confirming what he’d already suspected. “I bent the bars, didn’t I?” That was _not_ supposed to be able to happen. He’d made sure the metal was rated for more than the highest amount of force SHIELD had recorded him exerting, at the height of a particularly brutal battle simulation. 

Licking her lips, eyes still wide, Wanda nodded. Apparently having sex got him more excited than a vicious fight. Well, it was certainly a more _enjoyable_ way of getting his blood up.

Groaning, he tugged her head back down to his shoulder - _carefully_ \- and rolled them over onto their sides. The move caused him to slide out of her, making them both gasp. Wanda wrapped her arms around him, and pressed close against him. 

Steve held her gently, feeling lazy and sated, though still a touch apprehensive about the whole thing. “Still think I can learn to control it with enough practice?” he asked wryly.

Grimacing, Wanda flicked her gaze up to the bed frame, then back to him. “Perhaps we should be even more careful about trying,” she admitted. “At least now, you know what it’s like. All of it. We won’t have to hold back in the dreams.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to wake me up that way again, though,” Steve said, pushing his anticipation and pleasure at the thought towards her. “It would certainly make the mornings a lot less unsatisfying, even if we don’t risk going all the way again.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” she agreed, grinning at him. “Do whatever our minds can conceive of at night, and get to have the real thing when we wake. Twice the fun, and the best of both worlds.”

“You’re insatiable,” he laughed, so far from complaining he wasn’t even on the same continent.

“I’m picking it up from you,” she retorted, and he hugged her close.

She’d taught him so much, given him pleasure in so many ways he’d thought were beyond him after the serum had changed his body so drastically. They’d been striving for balance in their relationship since she’d first knocked it into his head that it couldn’t be one-sided, but now Steve wondered if they’d gotten tipped to the other side. What had he really given her in return?

“Stability,” Wanda whispered into his ear, picking up on the direction of his thoughts and emotions. “Shelter. Hope. Trust. Belonging.” Pausing, she took a breath and added even more quietly, “Love.”

They both went still for a moment after she said the word, because it was the first time either of them had brought it up. In all honesty, Steve hadn’t thought to try to quantify what he was feeling, because what he got through their link spoke louder than any words or labels could say. It had happened gradually, affection turning to caring turning to love in a creeping progression he hadn’t consciously noticed. Now that she’d drawn attention to it, he couldn’t believe he’d missed realizing how hard he’d fallen for her.

He sent a burst of all that through to Wanda, and felt her pleasure and answering emotions. “I love you, too. How the hell did we get so lucky? You’re probably literally the only woman in the world I could do this with.”

“As you are possibly the one man in the world I could bring myself to open up to and trust as much as I did Pietro,” she countered. “There is no one else out there like you, Steve. I don’t want to say that it’s fate; I can’t stand the idea that something caused both of us such horrible pain in our lives simply to bring us to each other. And yet...”

“Not fate,” Steve said, because he agreed with her reasoning. “Not destiny. Choice. The choices we both made, that led us here. Maybe there’s some kind of higher power that’s deciding to give us a damned break, or maybe not. Either way, we _are_ here, and I don’t intend to let go.”

“Never let go,” Wanda whispered. “I promise I won’t, either.”


	8. Chapter 8

Public events were far from Steve’s favourite thing to do, especially when he was supposed to be there as Captain America, not Steve Rogers. Doubly so when the event was something _Tony_ was hosting, even if the name on the tickets was actually Pepper’s. But it was for charity, and a damned good cause - raising funds for additional humanitarian relief and supplies to send to devastated Sokovia.

And _these_ supplies Steve was going to make sure reached their intended recipients, if it meant sending half the STRIKE teams on the Avengers base to be certain of it.

Keeping that thought firmly in mind helped him to combat his nerves to some extent, but it only went so far. At least he’d managed to put his foot down and insisted on wearing his old dress uniform, not the field suit. The anachronistic uniform was good enough to satisfy most people who wanted their picture taken with Captain America at these sorts of events. Tony had grumbled, but it wasn’t as if he would be wearing the Iron Man suit.

On second thought, Steve didn’t think he’d put it past the man to wear that to a party. Pepper might make him regret it, though.

Beside him he saw Wanda drain the last of her champagne, and he winced. That was already her second glass, which wasn’t unreasonable in the course of an hour, but he had a bad feeling his nerves were infecting her. “Sorry,” he murmured, plucking the empty glass from her fingers and setting it on a table, before wrapping her hand in his instead. “I hate these things.”

“You think I’d be enjoying myself if not for your dislike of public displays?” she replied, equally soft. Her hand squeezed tight around his, and Steve blinked as he realized not all the anxiety he was feeling was his own.

Belatedly, it occurred to him that this sort of thing was no more Wanda’s natural environment than his. The only crowds she was used to being in the middle of were at protest rallies. He already knew this was the first time she’d ever worn a formal dress; Natasha and Hill had carried her off to go shopping for it a week ago. She’d refused to let him see it before he picked her up tonight, and had spent hours fussing over her hair and makeup, also with Natasha’s help.

“Relax,” he said, projecting encouragement and his genuine appreciation of her. “You look fantastic. You put everyone else to shame.”

It was true, she looked amazing. The floor-length dress was deceptively simple, making an elegant statement in black, sweeping fabric. The only ornamentation was her signature scarlet glittering on the shoulders and down the back - what there was of a back, anyway. Steve had thought the dress was demure until the first time she’d turned around, and then he’d nearly choked. Still, he had to admit he enjoyed being able to put a polite hand at her waist and getting to have skin contact.

“It doesn’t help that half the people we’ve been introduced to are names I recognize from my days _protesting_ Stark Industries,” she said, biting her lip.

Steve grimaced, because that factor hadn’t occurred to him when he’d asked her to come as his plus one. He’d only been thinking that having her there with him would make the interminable event more bearable, but he hadn’t considered the effect it would have on her.

“There’s no reason you have to stay glued to my side to be introduced to every senator and rich guy Tony knows,” he told her. “Go get some food, sit and enjoy the band. Talk to Clint or Hill. They’re not as well known so they’re not getting mobbed the way Tony and Natasha and I are. Too bad Thor isn’t here. Between him and Tony they always manage to keep the whole room’s attention.”

Wanda was smiling now, so Steve gave her a little pat on the shoulder and pushed her gently towards where Clint was lurking by the canapés. At the same time Natasha caught his eye and gestured him over, so he sighed and got back to work. At least if he thought of it _as_ work it didn’t seem any worse than, say, digging trenches had been.

Not much worse, anyway.

After another exhausting round of introductions and handshaking and smiling for bragging photos, there was finally a lull in the crowd. Steve took the chance to slip off to one of the back corners, where he’d already spotted Natasha and Hill hiding for a break of their own. “God, I hate this stuff,” he muttered as he joined them.

“Come on, you were a movie star back in the day,” Hill teased him with a wink. “I’ve never understood why you were fine with all the publicity then but dislike it so much now.”

“Back then, it was the only way I _had_ to contribute,” Steve retorted. “I was grateful to have that much. The moment I found a place in the field, I stopped showing up for the medal award ceremonies and press conferences. Right now, there are about a million better things I could be doing.”

“At least it’s for a good cause,” Natasha consoled him, patting him on the back. “And hey, you get to admire Wanda all dressed up.”

Glancing to the other side of the room, where he could feel the slight tug of their link telling him her location, Steve smiled to see his girl commiserating with Clint in another corner. He could feel her genuine amusement and contentment, the last of her nerves gone with the familiar company and the lack of old enemies in her face. Knowing Clint, he was probably poking fun at the dignitaries and senators, and she seemed to be enjoying herself at last.

At least one of them was.

"Speaking of which, did you really need to bring the Hot Topic reject with you?” Tony asked from behind them. Steve turned to see the other man strolling up with Pepper on his arm. “I know you're kind of busy with the new team, Rogers, but you could _try_ to find a real date."

“Excuse me?” Steve said, startled by the unexpected attack. He didn’t recognize Tony’s reference, but he didn’t need to know exactly what it meant to understand it was intended as an insult. An unflattering one, judging by the way Pepper smacked Tony’s shoulder and Hill rolled her eyes.

“At least somebody taught her how to dress up, though the stock prices on kohl must have dropped a few points. She’s only got a pound or so on tonight,” Tony continued, oblivious to Steve’s steadily increasing glare. “Only three rings, too. I’m impressed by her restraint.”

“Stark, you really don’t want to go there,” Natasha said, the tone of the warning almost sing-song to match the amusement in her eyes.

“Let him dig his hole,” Steve told her. The ice in his voice should have warned Tony, but as usual, the other man was paying attention to nothing except himself. Steve understood why Tony refused to forgive Wanda, although he thought Tony unfairly put more of the blame on her than himself for the events leading to Ultron’s creation. Wanda frightened Tony, and he’d never dealt well with admitting to or facing his fears.

Understanding the reasons still didn’t mean Steve was going to put up with Tony saying this kind of crap about her.

“I mean, really, given her past history with Stark Industries it’s kind of tacky for Maximoff to be here at all,” Tony added. “If you had to cheat and bring a co-worker, why not pick Hill? At least she’s got the background and ability to blend in with a high-level crowd, and she’s a lot less offensive.”

“Wow, that’s a high compliment,” Hill said with biting sarcasm. “And I have my own date, thank you for implying that I wouldn’t.”

“Watch your mouth, Stark,” Steve ground out. _Offensive_? He’d show Stark offensive. A muscle jumped in his jaw from how hard he was clenching his teeth, and he narrowed his eyes at Tony. It made no impact on the other man, but across the room he saw Wanda look around with an alarmed expression. She sent a question at him, and he tried to let her know he was fine but he was pretty sure she got more anger than reassurance.

“Oh, am I stomping on your sense of chivalry?” Tony asked with false regret. “You know how I feel about her. She’s useful on the team, okay, I get it. She played nice in Sokovia, earned her place and your trust, whatever. I still don’t like her personally, and this is my party.”

“Technically, it’s mine,” Pepper pointed out with a sigh that suggested she knew perfectly well the objection would go straight over Tony’s head.

“Fine, but it’s my name on the building,” Tony said. “All I’m saying is that she...”

“ _Enough_ ,” Steve snapped, and took a step forward with his fist clenched. “She’s an Avenger and we wouldn’t have been able to clean up _your_ mess without her. You don’t haveta like her, but you’ll show her the respect she’s Goddamn well earned. One more comment and the next words you an’ I exchange are gonna happen out back.”

He could hear the rough overtones of Brooklyn sneaking into his words more and more as he spoke, though he struggled to keep both his voice and temper under control. Tony looked unimpressed, of course, and it wasn’t as though Steve actually intended to haul off and hit the man... but he really wanted to.

“Steve.” Wanda’s voice cracked over him, accompanied by a sharp stab of annoyance through their bond. Steve blinked and looked down to discover she’d wrapped her hand around his right wrist, physically restraining him from lifting the fist any further as well as increasing the strength of the link.

When she saw that she had his attention, she raised an eyebrow at him. “I know you’re technically on duty, but that doesn’t mean you need to go heroing,” she reminded him tartly. “If I cared about Stark’s opinion of me, I could defend myself.”

Taking a deep breath, Steve let it out slowly and released some of the tension in his muscles with it. “If you think that was me being self _less_ , you ain’t paying enough attention,” he said, sharing his amusement at the idea with her. That hadn’t been him playing the stalwart hero, just the angry lover. “Nobody talks about my girl like that.”

The wide smile that spread over her face made her eyes sparkle, and she slipped her hand down to twine her fingers with his instead. He could sense her surprise at his insistence on defending her, and pleasure that he cared enough to want to.

“Well, in that case,” she said with a magnanimous nod. “Carry on being selfish. And I still don’t like you either, Stark, but I’m willing to set it aside and be professional about it. There’s no reason to make Steve miserable by putting him in the middle.”

“Yeah, because without you to argue about, he and I will never butt heads again,” Steve snorted, but there was a reluctant smile tugging at his lips as he squeezed her hand.

“Wait, wait,” Tony exclaimed, looking back and forth between them. “When the hell did this happen? Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

“I did try, just now,” Natasha said, smirking. “You’re ages behind on Avengers gossip these days. They were old news months ago.”

“If it makes you feel any better, Nat told me about it and I didn’t believe her,” Clint added with good humour. He’d apparently followed Wanda across the room, and he gave Steve a wink and a nod now.

“Aren’t you kind of robbing the cradle, Rogers?” Tony turned to Steve with a supercilious look.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Stark,” Steve grumbled. “Don’t you ever stop? She’s not _that_ much younger than me.”

“Well, technically she is,” Hill chuckled. “Then again, I don’t think there’s anybody you could date who _wouldn’t_ count as ‘cradle-robbing’.”

“How old are you, anyway?” Wanda asked him curiously.

“Ninety-seven,” Steve told her. It had been a long time since he’d tripped over the number, but he still felt weird saying it.

“I know what year you were born in,” she scoffed, and he could feel her amused exasperation. “How old are _you_?”

Oh. Well, yeah, that was kind of a different question. “Thirty, give or take a few months,” he said, sending her his gratitude for making the distinction. “I didn’t wake up on the exact date I crashed, after all.”

Wanda shook her head. “Less than ten years, then. That’s not so bad.”

“Don’t forget there’s a good chance the serum will keep Cap young until the day he keels over on a battlefield somewhere,” Clint put in, chuckling. “Give it a few decades and people will be calling you a cougar.”

That was something Steve tried hard not to think about, and he wished Clint hadn’t brought it up. Sitting by Peggy’s bedside as she died slowly of old age, watching as she deteriorated day by day, was one of the worst experiences he’d ever had to go through. The idea of doing the same thing some day with Wanda, with _everyone_ standing here with him now, was too much to handle.

His flare of pain and fear struck a similar chord within Wanda, and echoed back to him with harmonies of her own dread. “Because Avengers have such long lifespans?” she replied, her tone bitter. Clint had the grace to wince and look apologetic. “If one of us outlives the other, I doubt the cause will be old age.”

And he could feel _her_ pain at that thought, understandably. She’d already lost the other half of her soul once. Steve would never be as incredibly close to her as Pietro had been but he was very much a part of her now, and losing that would be no less agonizing the second time. Maybe more so.

He couldn’t promise that he’d never die on her, no more than she could promise not to grow old. All Steve could do was counter the fear with as much affection and reassurance as he could muster to send, a flood of near-Biblical proportions.

The tension in her shoulders relaxed as she absorbed his emotions. When she showered him with a waterfall of love in return it got easier for him to breathe, and he squeezed her hand again.

“Does anyone else find it creepy when they do that?” Natasha complained. “It’s weird enough that he’s smiling and laughing all the time, without adding in the silent conversations.”

Steve worried for a moment that she was genuinely put off - it wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned finding the side effects of the link creepy - but Wanda caught his concern and relayed the amusement Natasha was really feeling.

“I think they’re sweet,” Hill said, smirking. “At least he’s started paying attention in meetings again.” Steve flushed at the teasing reminder.

“Thank God, the tension was killing me,” Natasha replied fervently, which of course only made Steve blush harder. Beside him Wanda was laughing silently at his embarrassment, unashamed of her part in the whole thing.

“Are we sure she hasn’t rewired his brain?” Tony asked, rolling his eyes dramatically. “I mean, come on, the old man having a real date is unbelievable enough all on its own. Four years and not a girl to be seen, and he picks this one of all people? What are the odds, really?”

“What did I say about the nasty comments?” Steve growled, glaring at him again. “She doesn’t need to mess with my head to get my interest. Not all of us are driven to try _every_ possibility before finding the right person.”

“I think you make a wonderful couple,” Pepper added, smiling at them both. Steve didn’t miss it when she elbowed Tony sharply, though she tried to be discreet about it.

“All right, fine, objection withdrawn,” Tony said with a long, drawn-out sigh. “You can bring your girlfriend to the parties, Rogers.”

“Damn, here I was hoping maybe you’d stop inviting me when you knew it meant she’d be coming,” Steve said with an exaggerated sigh of his own. “Oh, well. Can’t have everything, I guess.”

“If we’re no longer in danger of drowning in testosterone, I’m stealing Steve now,” Wanda declared, tugging his hand. “I want a dance.”

Glancing over at the area by the musicians, Steve saw that they had indeed cleared the floor and several couples were dancing. The soft smile on Wanda’s lips and the equally gentle comfort and reassurance she was projecting told him she hadn’t forgotten his dark dream, and knew exactly what she was offering.

Hope for the future, for that place to belong that he’d thought was forever out of his reach. A reminder that even though he’d lost everything, there were still new things to find and cherish. Proof that being Captain America didn’t require Steve Rogers to stay buried in the ice.

 _This_ was the right way for her to fix the pain she’d caused by that dream.

“Yeah,” he said, grateful when his voice came out steady. “Yeah, I’d like that. Let’s dance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> http://www.bestbridalprices.com/jovani-jvn-style-jvn98086-p134396?ref=c1678 is what I based Wanda's dress on, for the curious.
> 
> The fabulous initiating Stark-snark line is not mine, but was provided by overdoseaffliction. I can never write his dialogue well enough, lol. Many thanks!


End file.
